Jessica Stockholder’s public art installation “Color Jam”…
June 04, 2012|By Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune reporter
The artist and members of the Chicago Loop Alliance walked up 10 stories of an abandoned building Monday morning and crunched over layers of paint chips and debris to reach the corner windows and gain a new perspective on the city’s latest large-scale public art project.
What they saw was the previously nondescript intersection of Adams and State streets enlivened by geometrically precise sections of bright colors — a warm, orangish red, a sky blue and what multimedia artist Jessica Stockholder, 53, deemed a “new leaf green” — covering not only the sidewalks and crosswalks but also creeping up the facades of the corner buildings. The piece is called “Color Jam,” and it officially opens Tuesday — “opens” being an operative term for “will be finished by,” because it’s hard to open something that’s already being experienced and stepped on by thousands of pedestrians.
“The reflection is really beautiful,” Stockholder said as she looked out one window, observing how the glass building across the street not only was adorned with its own red vinyl covering but also reflected the red scrim decorating the one in which she stood. It’s one thing to envision the imposition of colors on a city intersection, quite another to see them actually at work, interacting with the elements and the daily chaos of a bustling city.
“It picks up details like I couldn’t have imagined,” she said. “The challenge was to have the work maintain itself in the middle of all this. The hope is it does that while embracing all of the busyness and clatter.”
Philip Barash, the Chicago Loop Alliance’s director of marketing and development, also was struck by what he saw out the window.
“We knew Jessica Stockholder’s sketches, and they’re beautiful pieces of art,” he said. “(This is) more vibrant. It’s living. It’s working.”
The Chicago Loop Alliance selected Stockholder, a Seattle native who moved to Chicago from New Haven, Conn., last summer to become chair of the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts, to create this summer’s Art Loop installation. It follows Kay Rosen’s “GO DO GOOD” — its centerpiece a several-stories-tall black-on-yellow message painted on a State Street building last year — and Tony Tasset’s massive fiberglass Eye that stared out from Pritzker Park in 2010.
When you think of color in a city, you often think of advertising. Signs are colorful to grab your attention against a neutral backdrop of streets, sidewalks and building facades that tend to be neutral by nature.
Stockholder’s vision made color part of the city itself, and she submitted sketches of an intersection with three different colors delineated by diagonal lines and stretching across the streets and sidewalks and up the buildings. Then the Chicago Loop Alliance, a business-supported organization that advocates for the Loop and, in particular, State Street, set out to make it a reality.
“They gave me her sketch and said, ‘Figure it out,'” said Tristan Hummel, the CLA’s project manager and curator.
One challenge was determining a suitable intersection. The CLA liked the idea of basing the installation at State and Madison Streets because those streets divide east and west and north and south addresses. But, Hummel said, there were issues with some of the buildings there, including the under-construction Target, in terms of how much of the facades could be covered and what kind of materials could be used.
Stockholder said she preferred the aesthetics of the State and Adams buildings anyway, two of which are glass, one concrete and one stone. Said Hummel: “That’s kind of a dumpy corner and could really use something like this.”
Still, he noted, arranging for that corner’s use required the cooperation of many entities, including the four buildings (some of which had specific color requests) and the Chicago Department of Transportation. “It’s a never-ending process of getting permissions, and even to figure out who to get permission from can be a process,” Hummel said.
One victim of this process was Stockholder’s intention to cover the entire intersection with color. Citing traffic safety concerns, the city instead allowed the artist to color in the crosswalks and to design an oval pattern for the intersection’s center, scheduled to be the installation’s final touch Monday night.
“It is too bad we don’t have color all over the road, but I can understand why the city wouldn’t want that,” Stockholder said. “They don’t want to have accidents and get sued.”
The execution was tricky as well. Hummel said although it might have been easier and cheaper to paint everything, that scenario adds environmental and practical issues, especially when you consider the eventual removal. (“Color Jam” is scheduled to remain through Sept. 30.)
