Helmut Jahn, photographed for Newcity’s Design 50 2016 by Joe Mazza/Bravelux
ART
Remembering Karl Wirsum
ARTnews agrees Wirsum was a “homegrown treasure”: “Wirsum’s art took its cues from a wide range of sources, from comic books to Jean Dubuffet’s art brut paintings. In his 1968 painting ‘Screamin’ Jay Hawkins,’ now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, the musician is imagined as a robot-like being whose body pulses with yellow bolts and seems to emanate light. His beady eyes look more like those of a lizard, and his legs are partially orange and blue with green leg hair. At his head are two green birds that clash with the maroon background. The painting thrums with an electric intensity that animates much of Wirsum’s art of the era. Works such as these have turned Wirsum into a hometown hero in Chicago. …’Karl Wirsum is an art star,’ the Reader wrote in 2017. ‘The low-key member of the Hairy Who—the 1960s art group nestled inside the Chicago Imagists movement—would probably balk at this characterization, and the art market may not have rewarded him as such, but he is one of our homegrown treasures.’”
From Nicole Rudick’s 2015 interview with the modest Wirsum about influences in Hyperallergic: Dubuffet’s “use of multiple materials — his plaster work, the collages with butterflies, the use of tile grout to give his two-dimensional work a more relief-like dynamic. His use of materials influenced me. That’s also what I like about Picasso, that he arbitrarily took materials and made them into some kind of creation. My painting ‘Baseball Girl’ (1964) was accompanied by a number of drawings, and the owner of ‘Baseball Girl,’ Ruth Horowitz, had eight or nine of these drawings, and Dubuffet was very interested in her collection. He was briefly in Chicago and stopped by and saw these drawings and was enthused by them. And she gave him one of my drawings. It was a stamp of approval from Dubuffet. A few years later, I did a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins painting — it’s a piece that has been associated with me a lot. I didn’t make it for any commercial purpose, but there was a record company that was reintroducing Screamin’ Jay and bringing out some of his old hits and I knew a guy who had become an art director for this record company. He knew my painting and said that he’d like to use it for the cover. It needed final approval from Screamin’ Jay himself, and he said he dug the cover. That’s another stamp of approval I hold dear. Those moments help me move forward when I get overwhelmed by too many different things.”
Black Arts Movement Star Eugene “Eda” Wade Was 81
A Chicago star in the Black Arts Movement, Eugene “Eda” Wade passed in Baton Rouge on April 15. “It took two years for Eugene ‘Eda’ Wade to complete one of his biggest projects,” writes Maureen O’Donnell at the Sun-Times, “painting the [steel] fire doors at Malcolm X College with images of Black culture and Egyptian and West African designs. He transformed the 64 steel canvases — 32 10-by-four doors, front and back — into something vibrant, inspiring and majestic. Maséqua Myers, who went on to become executive director of the South Side Community Art Center, remembers how, as a student attending Malcolm X, the doors ‘instilled an immeasurable amount of historical pride to hundreds of thousands of young African American students walking by them daily.’ … Wade also repainted sections of Chicago’s Wall of Respect mural at East 43rd Street and South Langley Avenue in 1967. The building and its mural have long since been torn down, but art historians often cite it as the nation’s ‘original community-based outdoor Black Power mural,’according to Jeff Huebner. ‘The Wall of Respect helped launch “a revival of mural painting in the United States,”’ said Daniel Schulman, director of visual art for DCASE. It displayed images of cultural icons including Muhammad Ali, James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, Ornette Coleman, Wilt Chamberlain, W.E.B. DuBois, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, Sidney Poitier, Nina Simone, Cicely Tyson and Malcolm X.”
DESIGN
Bicycling Helmut Jahn Struck, Killed By Two Cars Outside St. Charles Near His Home
“More than any other architect, Jahn extended the Chicago tradition of marrying technological innovation and architectural artistry into the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century,” architecture critic Blair Kamin tweeted on Sunday morning. “But his impact was global, stretching from his native Germany to South Africa to China to several American cities, including Chicago, New York and Philadelphia… His buildings and persona were equally audacious… His United Airlines terminal at O’Hare reintroduced the romance of travel into a building type that had devolved into cool, placeless rationalism. To be in it was to know you were entering an architectural capital. Though Jahn is best known for the Thompson Center… his imprint on Chicago is much broader. It includes Chicago Board of Trade addition, the CTA station at O’Hare, the State Street dorm at IIT, Accenture Center… In short, it would be a huge mistake to judge Jahn’s legacy solely by the Thompson Center.”
The Tribune with the accident report: Jahn “was struck by two vehicles while riding his bicycle Saturday afternoon, according to Campton Hills police. He was riding northeast on Old Lafox Road, approaching its T-shaped intersection with Burlington Road about 3:30pm Saturday… according to a news release from Campton Hills police, a village near St. Charles in west suburban Kane County.”
Architectural historian Elizabeth Blasius: “Helmut Jahn helped move Chicago architecture through the modern movement and into the twenty-first century. He never saw his work or his ideas as a static body, and showed an investment in both the future of the buildings he designed and the people who engaged with them. Helmut invited us to lunch at his office shortly before we began the National Register nomination for the Thompson Center, and continued to be accessible throughout the process. He was brimming with thoughts, ideas and stories.”
From F. Philip Barash’s May cover story for Newcity, “State v. Jahn: The Thompson Center is dead, long live the Thompson Center.”“What does it feel like to be Helmut Jahn, a lion, a loner, an octogenarian who still reports to work every day, pandemic be damned; whose letterhead bears his name in sports car-red bold all-caps; who dreams skyscrapers ever taller, ever further; who looks out, from the windows of his Loop office at the building that made his reputation and that, in these gentle valedictory years of an enviable life, may soon implode—burning on reentry from a decades-long voyage in outer space? Or, more likely, be bulldozed without much ceremony—at an estimated cost of $20 to $150 million—under cover of a construction scrim printed with platitudes about a brighter, blander future? What does it feel like to command a view of the demolition crews, busy behind barricades, from the offices of a firm whose fate is as precarious as that of the Thompson Center?”
“He made no small plans. And he made no apology for his own stature, nor that of most of his clients,” Chris Jones writes in the Trib obituary. “‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong in using a building to connote achievement and a certain commercial power,’ Jahn once said. ‘I think that’s the way architecture has been used historically. Great statesmen, great emperors, great dictators always build great buildings.'”
Preservation Futures reported on Friday: “An important milestone for the Thompson Center: the building’s nomination to the National Register of Historic Places is scheduled to be discussed by the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council at its June meeting. [It] would be the first postmodern building in Chicago or Illinois on the Register, and one of only a handful in the nation. While it doesn’t protect the building from demolition, listing on the Register provides tax and other incentives that make adaptive reuse more affordable, and is a crucial first step towards its preservation. A coalition including Landmarks Illinois, Preservation Chicago, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, AIA Chicago, DOCOMOMO, and others commissioned the nomination and are working to support the building’s preservation.”
“Jahn is 58 now and while he is hardly an elder statesman, he undoubtedly has matured,” Kamin wrote of Jahn’s elevated global profile in the Trib in 1998. “Putting the excesses of his postmodern period behind him, he has entered a new, self-assured phase marked by a return to his Miesian roots and a bold extension of the master’s austere aesthetic. More often than not, the result is architecture of impeccable quality and singular significance. There is the dignified, pyramid-topped skyscraper, the Messe Tower, which is a beloved skyline icon. There is the mast-topped office building, Kurfurstendamm 70, just ten feet wide at its base, which covers a facade sheared off for a road-widening. There is the theatrical airport hotel, the Hotel Kempinski, which lends a dash of urbanity to a building type that has conspicuously lacked it. And there is the Sony Center, the urban megacomplex, which will show upon its completion that entertainment architecture doesn’t have to be Mickey Mouse. These are more than dazzling individual objects. They are path-breaking planning exercises that bring new expression to changing ways of living.”
DINING & DRINKING
Half Acre Leaving Lincoln Avenue
“Half Acre Beer Co., the maker of Daisy Cutter and one of the city’s most successful breweries, is leaving its North Center home after thirteen years,” reports Eater Chicago of the taproom that’s been shuttered since March 2020. “Half Acre has sold its space to Hop Butcher For The World, a fellow Chicago brewery that’s lusted for its own taproom for years… The move marks a milestone for North Center and Chicago’s beer scene. Half Acre, which has since opened a larger production facility with brewpub and beer garden on Balmoral, had outgrown its tiny location at 4257 North Lincoln. The deal allows Hop Butcher to make more beer and have a consumer-facing space to showcase its lineup. Half Acre can focus on its Balmoral facility where it ships out beer across the country.”
FILM & TELEVISION
Participant On Keeping Hampton History Alive
Participant Productions, one of the companies behind “Judas and The Black Messiah,” goes to bat on Twitter for a local initiative: “Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. embodies all of his father’s revolutionary spirit. Let’s help him #SaveTheHamptonHouse to honor his father’s legacy and inspire future leaders.”
Chicago Film Society Project Leaders With Manhattan’s Metrograph
Chicago Film Society has programmed “Girls on Film” from their collection of “Leader Ladies” for Metrograph in New York, with six virtual screenings, including two shorts programs and four features with introductions by the CFS crew and a panel discussion with CFS’s Julian Antos and Rebecca Lyon, Andrew Oran, from FotoKem, the largest American film lab, “storied projectionist” Katie Trainor, manager of the film collection at MoMA and Genevieve Yue, assistant professor of Culture and Media at the New School. “Used by film laboratories during processing and printing, the images known as ‘leader ladies’ or ‘china girls’ usually feature a woman seated mildly next to a color chart, although the variations are seemingly endless. A few frames of these images often appear among the countdown on release prints, a leftover from the laboratory processes for which they were required and visible only to those who handled such objects—projectionists, archivists, and collectors. Once mere calibration tools used in photochemical film production, they have come to represent something much more, the residual traces of the work that went into the creation of cinema for over a hundred years. Their presence on film prints (secretly sharing space with Hollywood’s starlets) is a fleeting visual document of the film industry’s vast off-screen labor pool,” writes Rebecca Lyon.
MEDIA
A Look Back At Four Decades of Mark Giangreco
The Sun-Times’ Sports Saturday went long on the sixty-nine-year-old broadcaster Mark Giangreco’s nearly forty years in Chicago broadcasting, which came to an abrupt end in January after an on-air joke about news anchor Cheryl Burton. “‘Chicago doesn’t have movie stars — they’ve got sports stars,’ said Carol Marin, who worked with Giangreco. ‘Without any Hollywood [types], you’re stuck with the news people.'” Writes Jeff Agrest, “Once [Giangreco] became comfortable in Chicago, he pushed the boundaries and inevitably crossed them a few times. But labeling Giangreco a ‘bad boy’ would be a misnomer. Another element of his authenticity is his generosity… Those he has touched have reciprocated with an unyielding show of support for which he is grateful. Another reason for his success — and that of his stations’ newscasts in the ratings wars — was his unique style. He was paid to live on the edge, and handsomely. While others in town kept their sportscasts straightforward, Giangreco kept viewers coming back to see what he’d do next. ‘I have some regrets. That’s what happens when you shoot from the hip,’ said Giangreco. ‘But that was just me. I’m lucky that the fans in this town were a lot like the people I grew up with. I never wanted to be a celebrity. I just wanted to be creative and have fun with the subject matter, which is sports. I was lucky that just being myself worked.'”
Washington Post On Tribune Publishing’s Angel Problem
The Washington Post casts doubt on the cannonballing Tribune Publishing-Alden Global Capital deal, headlining the 1,600-word piece, “In a hedge fund’s bid for Tribune’s newspapers, a hidden risk lurks in the fine print.” The reporters see a repetition of the Sam Zell years, which left that investor a billionaire. “They haven’t got the money they’re claiming to have,” said an independent investor who is considering buying one of the Tribune papers from whoever wins the deal. “The board of directors should have known to investigate and confirm the financial resources of a prospective buyer that would be paying all equity cash.The fact that they didn’t is frankly stunning.” An attorney quoted by the Post says that despite Alden’s commitments, one particular clause would likely allow the notorious hedge fund to borrow heavily to get Tribune. “It’s one thing for [Alden] to come and say, ‘we are going to put in all cash for equity.’ It’s another thing to say ‘it’s an all-cash deal, but we’re going to finance that cash with debt.’ … Mason Slaine, a Florida investor who has expressed interest in buying the Orlando Sentinel and the South Florida Sun Sentinel from the Tribune portfolio, said he would expect Alden to ‘leverage as much as they can and take as much money out of the company… The real tragedy at the end of the day is that no one showed up to buy these things… There was no one in Chicago. All these stand-up, wealthy people in Chicago, and no one showed up,’ he said. ‘Very disappointing.’”
John Kass or Van Morrison? You Decide
At his Kass Watch Twitter account, journalist John Greenfield asks readers to discern who made which statement, Van Morrison, in his current single, “They Own The Media,” or Tribune content provider John Kass in past publications, including “They own the media. They control the narrative”; “Big Tech censoring dissent & controlling information”; “Why are you on Facebook?” and “If you’re intellectually honest, you have to say Soros.”
Chicago Leaders Spend Millions To Keep Secrets
Alexander Shur and David Jackson report at the Better Government Association site about a BGA investigation that shows Chicago leaders paid at least $2.4 million in legal fees to withhold public records from over a hundred lawsuits, defeating the purpose of a decade-old state reform measure to give citizens more power to shake loose government documents.
Stacy St. Clair Wins 2020 Anne Keegan Award
The Chicago Headline Club’s annual Anne Keegan Award, which honors journalists who write stories that capture the dignity and spirit of ordinary men and women, goes this year to Stacy St. Clair. “The first Illinois reporter to be allowed inside local hospitals after the pandemic took hold, St. Clair described acts of exhaustion, fear and courage,” the Club cites. “In these stories and many others she’s written over the years, St. Clair impressed the judges with her eye for detail, her talent for quickly sketching a scene and capturing the strength and character of people facing extraordinary challenges.”
MUSIC
Chance The Rapper Self-Distributes Concert Film
With the summer release of his concert film “Magnificent Coloring World,” Chance the Rapper is the first individual recording artist to self-distribute a film, under his House Of Kicks label, via AMC Theatres. The film marks the five years since the release of Chance’s mixtape “Coloring Book” and the Magnificent Coloring World tour, as well as a trio of Grammys, for Best New Artist, Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Album. “The House of Kicks is the film house which has become home to Chance, creating an artistic pod where he is reimagining music, film and virtual experiences,” a release for the release relates. “In 2020, Chance – who hit #1 on the charts with his song ‘Holy’ with Justin Bieber – adapted to stay-at-home orders and completely pivoted the concert experience. He created eleven virtual concerts, with Adweek declaring, ‘These performances redefine what it means to experience music remotely.'” Here’s the forty-eight second teaser.
STAGE
Dance For Life Will Be Live
Chicago Dancers United, which supports the health and wellness of Chicago’s professional dance community, has announced its primary annual fundraiser, Dance for Life, will take place live and in person on August 26 at Pritzker Pavilion, the group relays in a release. For the first time, admission is free. The thirtieth-anniversary performance will include DanceWorks Chicago, Giordano Dance Chicago, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, The Joffrey Ballet, Movement Revolution Dance Crew, South Chicago Dance Theatre, and Trinity Irish Dance Company, with Randy Duncan choreographing a world premiere finale. Dance for Life raises money for The Dancers’ Fund, which provides financial support for preventive health care and critical medical needs to any member of Chicago’s professional dance community. More information here.
ARTS & CULTURE
“Cancel Culture” and Playing Favorite
Chris Borrelli profiles popular SAIC professor Eileen Favorite at the Trib. “When I started teaching this class, I had a room full of art students who didn’t wantto pass judgment on anyone who called themselves an artist,” Favorite told Borrelli. “Just a decade ago, they forgave everything. I had to teach them how to take a stand against anyone. Now it’s the complete opposite. Lately though, maybe it’s swinging back again.” Borrelli writes, “For twenty years now, long before the #MeToo movement, ages before the #OwnVoices movement, when Harvey Weinstein was still feared, Kanye West was still about the music, and museums exhibited portfolios of amoral behavior with impunity, Favorite has toiled in the cancel culture. Indeed, before it was called cancel culture, she’s been considering our cancel culture. Since 2001, Favorite, a Chicago-based novelist and literature professor, has taught a class at SAIC titled ‘Love the Art, Hate the Artist.’ The university describes it as a course on the recurring question: ‘How do the biographical details of an artist’s life influence our attitude toward their work?’ But as one student said, ‘It’s really more like a course on how to be an artist and still be a good human.’ Naturally, it’s a minefield.”
