Giving Chicago its own Mount Rushmore was Kerry James Marshall’s idea for his biggest work ever, a mural that will be officially dedicated Monday morning at a gathering of city luminaries.
“RUSH MORE” is an homage to women who have shaped arts and culture in Chicago — including Gwendolyn Brooks, Oprah Winfrey, Sandra Cisneros and Maggie Daley — and it occupies a wall nearly half the size of a football field on the west facade of the Cultural Center.
“I thought, well, in the history of monuments you have very few that represent women, but in the history of Chicago you have very many women that played key roles in establishing culture here,” the South Side artist said late last week, a day before returning to put finishing touches on the work.
Marshall’s fee for the work was $1, a bargain considering last month saw a new record for the sale of a Marshall painting at auction, $5.04 million for “Still Life with Wedding Portrait,” a painting he had donated to a Museum of Contemporary Art benefit sale in 2015.
“That’s a part of that civic obligation thing,” Marshall said. “In a moment of weakness, I managed to be corralled into spending a lot of time I really didn’t have designing (the mural).”
This new work by one of the city’s most celebrated artists represents a kind of culmination of the city’s Year of Public Art. The initiative, in the 50th anniversary year of the dedication of the Daley Plaza Picasso sculpture, includes putting new public works in all 50 wards and significantly increasing the public art presence in CTA stations.
“Kerry James Marshall is one of the most renowned artists in the world today,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said. “You think of Kerry James Marshall. You think of the women. You think of the building. And you think of the 50-year anniversary of the Picasso piece. I can’t think of a better way to bring those threads together into one statement. It’s a tremendous gift for the city.”
The Cultural Center has become a sort of ground zero for easily accessible art in Chicago, with a steady stream of free, high-caliber exhibitions in its galleries.
Said Emanuel, “There’s a poetry to the fact that it’s a building that was saved by a woman, ‘Sis’ Daley,’ ” Eleanor Daley, the wife of longtime Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, who in the early 1970s kept the former Chicago Public Library from being razed in favor of an office tower.
There’s also poetry in the locale for Marshall. When he was a young, unknown artist just moved to Chicago in the late 1980s to be with his future wife, the actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce, “the very first exhibition I had was at the Cultural Center,” he said.
The 132-foot-wide by 100-foot-high mural was spearheaded and funded by Murals of Acceptance, a new not-for-profit founded by Kevin McCarthy, an artist, musician and Orland Park native who now lives in North Carolina and Los Angeles.
“It’s an idea I came up with and have been working on for about a year, to create a nonprofit that brings fine art to the streets and promotes acceptance to all people,” said McCarthy, 36, who secured the necessary funding, including $200,000 for putting up the mural, from the actors Patricia and David Arquette, who are friends of his, and the San Francisco-area philanthropists Marc and Lynne Benioff. “To be able to do the first one in the city I grew up in, with the best possible artist I could think of … it has been just a dream-come-true kind of thing.”
McCarthy said he brought his idea to Nathan Mason, the city’s curator of public art, “and he said, ‘We might have a wall for you.’ ” And the city helped put him in touch with Marshall, an African-American raised in Alabama and Los Angeles whose artistic project has been to see the black figure represented in museums.
Choosing to live and work on the South Side, Marshall is “a quiet hero of this city,” Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, said before the 2016 opening there of “Mastry,” Marshall’s rapturously received mid-career retrospective.
Marshall said he agreed to take on the mural project out of a sense of civic duty, yes, but also because the site intrigued him. The building’s west facade overlooks Garland Court, a sort of glorified, wide alleyway where little light comes in, and the mural wall itself is interrupted by two doorways and a huge, L-shaped cutout for a loading dock.
“It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever worked on,” said Marshall, 62. “But the scale is not the challenge. It’s the shape of the building. For me the challenge of designing something for that building is more interesting than anything else.”
First, he said, “I started out trying to figure out how to counteract the kind of concrete jungle quality of that alleyway. What would enliven that space some … open it up a little bit?”
Creating “a park-like forest scene, some sort of green space on that wall seemed a way to start,” he said. “Then, how do you make that more meaningful than just some pictures of some trees?”
That’s where he came on the idea of honoring Chicago women of culture, a list that he researched to come up with a cross-cultural, multi-generational list. Beyond obvious names like Daley, wife of Mayor Richard M., and the poet Brooks, he included Susanne Ghez, a lion of the art world as longtime director of The Renaissaince Society; dancer Ruth Page; Poetry magazine founder Harriet Monroe; and the artist’s wife, who was a Goodman Theatre and Dearborn Homes Youth Drama Workshop co-founder.
To work around the loading dock dead space in the mural’s center, he devised the idea of making the trees totems decorated by the women’s faces. Up above are treetops, birds, a ribbon bearing the women’s names and a glorious yellow-and-blue sun. He also thought, he said, that “it would be insensitive” to the craftspeople executing his mural to make the top overly full of detail so the image is bottom-loaded.
But the wall is challenging, made of limestone cut with vertical grooves, making a straight diagonal line across the surface “almost impossible” to execute, the artist said.
His original design was about the size of a posterboard, McCarthy said, and then Jeff Zimmermann, who has done murals across Chicago for years, and his crew transferred that design to the wall. “He’s good at what he does,” Marshall said.
The work left for Marshall to do over the weekend he described as “a couple of adjustments. Some planes that need to be turned under, some areas of color that need to be merged. Some detail on some of the architecture that needed to be sharpened up a little bit.”
Marshall said he’s happy with it, but in a sense he’s already moved on. “I don’t feel it a necessity to have public works like that (in his portfolio),” he said. “The most interesting part is successfully solving the problem of making something work on that space. My interest starts to wane after I’ve solved the problem. I’m always interested in solving the problem.”
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
