Only Until Sunday for Tim Samuelson's Must-See Exhibition, Mecca Flat Blues, at the Cultural Center

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A tardy reminder that you have only through this Sunday, May 25th, to see Tim Samuelson's great exhibition, Mecca Flat Blues, at the Chicago Cultural Center.  It's notable for the story it tells - of the journey a single building from the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition to it's 1950's demolition to make way for Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall - and for the way it tells it, anchored by supersized photographs filling up the two-story space of the Sidney R. Yates gallery in a way that gives you as a spectator a true feeling of the scale and experience of this seminal Chicago building and its great atria.

You'll kick yourself if you miss it, and if you still need convincing, here's our copiously illustrated article on the show . . .

A Triumphant Exhibition creates a Time Machine to a Vanquished Architecture: Tim Samuelson's Mecca Flat Blues, at the Chicago Cultural Center

A Triumphant Exhibition creates Time Machine to a Vanquished Architecture: Tim Samuelson's Mecca Flat Blues, at the Chicago Cultural Center

click images for larger view (recommended)

Friday, February 21, The Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington,  will be hosting an opening reception for Mecca Flat Blues from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.  The exhibition, in the 4th floor Sydney R. Yates gallery, runs through May 25, 2014

West of State Street, where 34th street once ran, stands Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall, one of the world's most famous buildings.   The brawny steel-and-glass “one room schoolhouse” sits within an expansive island of landscaped grounds, nested within the insular urban ecosystem that is the IIT campus.

Stand on the campus today and look around you, and it all appears almost primordial.  You can imagine it rising directly from the marshy land that was Chicago's original terrain.  And yet . . . if you remain very still - can you hear it?  Can you sense it?  The sound of jazz and the blues, a lament, the quiet but insistent voices of a vanquished city, wiped from the earth as cleanly as Carthage after the siege.

Mecca Flat Blues, the new exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center curated by the city's Cultural Historian, Tim Samuelson, is - first things first - a spectacular show, hypnotic in both image and story.  Above all else, however, it is  a Proustian meditation on architecture as a repository of memory.  Of how we create buildings to reflect our ambitions, pretensions and vanities.  And how soon those buildings become unmoored from original intent and, over the decades, are transformed and consumed by the earthier realities of life as it is lived day-by-day.

At the end, Mecca Flats, along with the once vibrant community all around it, was sacrificed to create the tabula rasa Mies required for his new campus plan.  It represented a contagion of poverty and decay that had to expunged to make the neighborhood safe for Mies's pristine new world.  The beginning, however, was something wholely different.

“The Largest Apartment House Ever Planned in Chicago”

That was the calling card for the Mecca Apartments, as detailed in an 1891 article in the Chicago Tribune.  Occupying a full half block on 34th Street, between State and Dearborn, formerly occupied by streetcar barns, the project would cost $600,000, be four stories tall, and house 96 flats and twelve stores on State.

Architects Willoughby J. Edbrooke and Franklin Pierce Burnham (yes, even the worst Presidents had their name foisted on unsuspecting babies) created three street elevations of Roman pressed brick with stone and terra cotta trim.   The alley elevation, which held the servant's entrance, was of a cruder red brick.  Every apartment was designed to have its own bay window to draw in the light.  Each dining room was to have hardwood sideboards, each kitchen gas ranges and refrigerators.

This was a time when the rich lived in houses and the poor lived in tenements.  The word “apartment” carried a negative stigma.  Apartment buildings for the affluent were likely to be called “apartment hotels” to separate them from the housing used by the unwashed masses.

The Mecca was a pioneering effort to make the apartment block safe for the affluent, to enhance the return on a plot of land not just through increased density, but also elevated price points.  In addition to the elegance of the facades, Edbrooke and Burnham created the Mecca as two great wings on either side of a large, landscaped carriage courtyard, with an arched entrance and a handsome fountain.  There were five separate entrances, each shared by only a handful of families, enhancing the feeling of intimacy.

Most boldly, the architects drew on the commercial example of Baumann and Huehl's 1889 Chamber of Commerce Building, which featured a central court rising the full 13-story height of the building.
Lined with cantilevered balconies with ornate iron railings, the court brought light and air - in a time before electricity or air conditioning - into the interior offices.  At the Mecca, there would be not just one but two huge courts - one for each wing -  33 wide and 170 feet deep, wrapped in balconies with elegant railings and light pouring in from the glass roof.

It didn't take long for it all to start to unravel.  The developer decided to cash in on the upcoming 1893 World's Columbian Exposition by converting the Mecca Apartments into a 650-room hotel for fair visitors, “The Largest and most richly furnished Permanent Hotel in Chicago”.  It flopped.  It turned out the Mecca's location was in a kind of limbo, at a disadvantageous  midway point between the Loop's luxury hotels and the fairgrounds miles away. Not along after the close of the fair, the Mecca was reconverted to apartments.   Many of the rooms had never been occupied, and the hotel's furnishings were sold at auction for 25 cents on the dollar.

In rich detail, Mecca Flat Blues, traces what happens next.  The Mecca's troubles continued in 1895, as one troubled tenant became a firebug, setting blazes at the bottom of two air shafts.  Mecca's shifting portrait can be traced through the list of residents compiled every ten years for the U.S. Census, copies of which are on display at the exhibition.  The 1900 census lists 365 people, mostly blue and white color employees.  Some residents were already taking in borders to help meet the rent.  Despite the original design providing them a separate entrance, no live-in servants were listed.

The basically working-class character of the building remained even as the racial composition changed radically.  The “Great Migration” saw the neighborhood becoming primarily Afro-American.  In May of 1912, the Chicago Daily Defender announced that the Mecca Flats for the first time was  “Open for Inspection” for Negro tenants.  An “Upstairs-Downstairs” aura descended on the Flats.  The more affluent tenants lived in the larger units and held dinner parties, while crime among poorer tenants became an increasing problem.  By 1914, building managers were telling The Defender that they were “powerless to prohibit the commingling of the races [but] have not allowed any prostitution in their apartments nor have they countenanced any violation of the law.”

The new emigrants from the south brought their culture with them.  State Street became “The Stroll”, a strip of jazz clubs, theaters and ballrooms that was jammed with humanity night after night.  Transplants from New Orleans found the Mecca's ornate balcony railings a welcoming echo of those of Bourbon Street.

At the end of the 1920's, however, the opening of the Regal Theater and Savoy ballroom in Bronzeville began to draw the nightlife away from State Street, and by the 1930's, the Mecca suffered from poor maintenance.  The skylights over the atria becoming filthy and cracked.  The 1940 census showed the building's population as 670 building,  but after wartime housing shortages kicked in, other estimates put it at as many as 2,500.

Armour Institute

In 1938, the Mecca had been deeded to the Armour Institute, which was soon to become IIT.  The Institute had made the decision to stay in the city, and, hiring Mies, to expand their campus all the way down to 35th street.  Armour moved quickly to demolish the Mecca, but the residents fought back in a battle that galvanized the community.  A bill sponsored by State Senator Christopher Wimbish passed the Illinois house 114 to 2 and the senate, 46 to 1, only to be vetoed by Governor Dwight Green.  As detailed in Daniel Bluestone's essential history, Chicago's Mecca Flat Blues, Armour wound up being the worst slumlord of all, lowering rents and filling up the building with ever poorer residents even as it let the structure rot without essential maintenance and repairs.

The Mecca became the subject of pioneering efforts in the genre now known as “ruin porn.”  In 1949, Harper's Magazine hired John Bartlow Martin to document the “Strangest Place in Chicago”, portraying an alien, exotic world for edification of the magazine's middle-class readers . . .

Inside, a powerful odor assails the visitor at once, musty, heavy, a smell compounded of urine and stale cooking and of age, not necessarily an unpleasant odor but a close powerful one, which, like that of marijuana, once smelled is never forgotten . . . always the sound of distant human voices, women talking, a baby squalling, children screaming, men muttering, no words distinguishable . . . All day long, people stand at the balconies, leaning over the wrought-iron railing with hands clasped out over them, gazing out at each other people facing them across the well in silence, gazing down at the floor far below, spitting, small human figures in a vast place, two or three on each of the floors, occasionally calling back and forth to one another, but most of the time just standing silent.

In 1950, Life magazine repurposed Martin's text into captions for a photo essay, The Mecca, Chicago's Showiest Apartment Has given Up All But the Ghost Life, using images by Wallace Kirkland.  One account stated that the light filtering through the filthy skylights gave the atria an other-worldy quality, making it seem almost as if you were underwater.

In 1952, the building was finally ready for demolition.   Newsweek reported that the last tenants had been moved out, and the structure scavenged for bits of Italian tile and hardwood floors. In 1982, Chicago Tribune columnist Vernon Jarrett remembered The Mecca as “one of the more notorious slum dwellings in the history of modern society,” but he also interviewed a former resident who recalled that “One thing the poor were able to maintain in that slum building was a feeling for each other after they had been deserted by the larger society.” Members of The Mecca Prayer Band would make weekly tours to see who was ill or destitute.  “They would then take up a collection of what little they could afford and help the sick.  They would also volunteer to bathe the sick and clean their apartments.”  Lillian Davis didn't sugar-coat - “It was a violent building,” where the janitors wore pistols and derelicts slept on the balconies, “But my best memories are of those who refused to be crushed.”

IIT Master Plan, image courtesy Posad Spatial Strategies

That was not the story that anyone wanted to hear.  The official narrative was clear.  This was the early days of urban renewal.  With the federal government's help, America's great cities were to find their revival in the clearing away of slums.  As with the IIT campus, the decay was to be surgically removed, entire neighborhoods obliterated.   The South Side renewal plan projected razing everything from the IIT campus east to the Lakefront.

As Bluestone has written, a new mythology of progress was being put in place, in which Mecca Flats was the crime-ridden poster child of a contagion that needed to be purged.  Armour offered to help residents relocate, but only to a safe distance - the college fought the construction of the mid-rise Dearborn Homes public housing project at its northern border.

Dearborn Homes

And yet, one of the most moving images in Mecca Flat Blues is a life-size photograph of area residents at a meeting organizing against the Mecca's demolition.  The people are all immaculately dressed, the men in business suits and ties, the women in their Sunday best.  It is a portrait of human dignity that refutes the myth that provided cover for a land grab.

The world of the people in that photograph was destroyed for a vision of the future that had no room for their presence.  It is the triumph of Mecca Flat Blues that it retrieves that vanished world from the abyss of imposed forgetfulness.

You begin by walking through a small corridor, reading the blow-ups of early newspaper articles on the Mecca.  Then you walk through the doors, and you're confronted by a massive photograph of the Mecca's entrance, the glass of the doors broken out or replaced with cheap plywood, with a stark white sign centered at the bottom of the tympanum that's the real estate equivalent of Dante's inscription above the entrance to hell.

You begin at the end, but as you step past the photo, into the Tiffany grandeur of the Sydney R. Yates Gallery, the entire history of Mecca Flats opens up before you like an unfolded fan, with two massive images of the buildings light courts at either end of the half-block long gallery.

Architecture's dimension of scale is difficult to express in reproduction.  In books, we accept it being confined to the maximum size of a page.  In museums, to the dimensions of the frame.  With rare exceptions, trying to reproduce the scale of a building is absurd.   We simply accept the dislocation of a three-dimensional object large enough for us to inhabit down to a flat, passive representation that we lord over as if from aerial remove.  It is not only detail, but the essential character of architecture, how it constantly changes through the ever-shifting perceptions of our corporeal bodies as we move around and through it, that is lost.

Tim Samuelson has tackled this problem before in his 2010 exhibition (also at the Cultural Center) Louis Sullivan's Idea, in which, working with Chris Ware, he deployed ceiling high photographs of Sullivan's buildings in the double-height galleries to give the viewer a sense of the architecture's scale.

Mecca Flats Blues takes it a step further.  Again, there are the oversized photographers, but against the bordello riot of red, green and gold that is the Yates Gallery, the huge black and white images don't just pop, they seems to float in the front of your retina.  The huge space is broken up into a sequence of rooms, each telling a part of The Mecca's story, often with material rarely if every seen before, including some of the original photographs artist Ben Shahn took of the Mecca as studies for the illustrations he created for Martin's Harper's piece.  There's also Kirkland's photographs, and phonograph records of the various covers of the James Blythe and Alexander Robinson song Mecca Flat Blues, originally recorded in 1924 by vocalist Priscilla Stewart with Blythe on the piano.

The music  plays continuously as you walk through the gallery.

There's also a table where you can not only peruse those decade-by-decade census lists, but read the Harper's and Life magazine pieces, as well as Gwendolyn Brooks' epic poem,  In the Mecca, placing the building at the center of a tale about the search for a lost child. 

In the end, however, you're drawn back to the endpoints of the exhibition, to those lovingly-restored railings - rescued from a collector who had used them on his porch - and falling into those super-sized photos of the atrium.  You're back in Mecca Flats, standing on the balcony gazing at the people across the way, from another time, another, now lost world, looking back at you.  Mecca Flats, the building, absorbed the experience of its times until it was all used up and crushed by the accumulated weight.  Mecca Flat Blues, the exhibition, is a heroic rescue of a suppressed cultural history, and an epic expression of architecture's tragic suspension between power and impotence.

 Mecca Flat Blues runs through May 25th, 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Monday through Thursday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Friday through Sunday (closed holidays).  There will be gallery talks at 12:15 p.m on February 27th and March 27th, and concerts at 12:15 p.m. on March 6 and May 3rd.  On April 8th, Thomas Dyja, author of The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream, will present a lecture, The Battle for the Mecca at 12:15 p.m.

新年快樂! Architecture as Canvas: Luftwerks takes over Cultural Center Facade to celebrate Chinese New Year in Chicago

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You apparently can't keep Luftwerk away from the Chicago Cultural Center.  It's been less than a month since their striking media exhibit Shift was on display in the CCL's 2nd floor galleriess.  Now Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero's mastery of color, light, video and projection has left the building and taken over it's long Michigan Avenue facade with Spring Light, which opened last night and repeats tonight (Saturday) and Sunday, 5 to 10:00 p.m.  It's described as . . .

A celebration of light and projection inspired by Chinese philosophy, art, architecture and traditional folklore illuminate the Chicago Cultural Center to commemorate the Chinese New Year. Spring Light transforms the building into a moving world where images of nature, people, geometry and color all intertwine in an artistic and harmonious balance.

Spring Light  is an initiative of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Choose Chicago, the city's tourism operation.  It's a two-week, city-wide celebration of the Chinese New Year and Spring Festival with a sequence of events that includes shadow puppets in Macy's windows, a free celebration by Redroom Theatre tonight (Saturday) from 6:00 to 7:30 in Navy's Pier Festival hall, and parades both on Argyle Street Saturday at 1:00 and the Lunar New Year parade on Wentworth in Chinatown Sunday at 1.

In a city that's besieged with financial problems, it's tempting to make some kind of comment on circuses in lieu of bread, but the fact of the matter is Chicago has an annual GDP of nearly $600 billion.  Rahm's Chinese New Year is a self-consciously shrewd move, not only to increase tourism, but to both address China as an increasingly powerful nation, and Chicago's own increasingly vibrant Chinese-American community.  (The events have already been picked up by Chinese news agency Xinhau.) Chicago is a great city, winter - especially this winter - is often cold and dark.  The Luftwerk installations are a welcome reminder of the city's resilience.

Spring Light plays with the element's neo-classical design with a series of overlays that evoke a cast-iron storefront, Renaissance-style rusticated stone, and even an Alhambra-like veneer of light. At one point it even seems to peel away the Cultural Center's facade and draw it up like someone removing a sweater over their head.  But there's a lot more than that, as you can seen in this video of excerpts (click on YouTube to see the video full-size):

Luminance has taken over the McCormick Tribune ice skating rink at Millennium Park.  As with Shift, the shadows of the skaters lose their monochrome and extend, contract and intersect in a rainbow of pastel colors. 

 

 

 

 

Also from Luftwerk:

Chicago Rediscovered in a Luminous Field, at Cloud Gate in Chicago's Millennium Park

Street Smarts: Chicago Street Art, at the Cultural Center only through Sunday - Plus our Photogallery on Art on the Street (and Viaduct)

Okay, so people liked our Monday story about the doomed Phillips House in Sheridan house a lot more than they liked Tuesday's post on pitching 150 North Riverside, so we're taking a break before part 2 to remind you of a great show at the Chicago Cultural Center's 4th floor exhibit hall, Paint Paste Sticker: Chicago Street Art. You have only through Sunday, January 12th to see it.  My apologies.

Painted, wheatpasted or stickered, made for a hard life on the streets or to enliven a domestic setting, the art flowing from the Chicago Street Art community is among the most intense and vibrant in the city today. The exhibit features work from over two dozen artists including Slang, Zore, Ish Muhammad, Hebru Brantley, Uneek, Statik, Brooks Golden, Chris Silva, You Are Beautiful, Oscar Arriola and an overview of projects by Chicago Urban Art Society & Pawn Works and Galerie F.

Jyoti Srivastava has a great post on the exhibition with photos of over a dozen works and curator Nathan Mason.   An article by the Reader's Deanna Isaac's profiles Statik, a/k/a, Rahmaan Barnes, who created his “remix” of Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, seen at the top of this post, entirely in spray paint.

Many of the artworks come from organized - and authorized - projects.   Others came from the more renegade forms of graffiti and tagging. I don't think I want to go back to days in 1980's when a deeply troubled New York City had its subway cars overrun with graffiti, nor am I comfortable with buildings and L stations being tagged by street gangs marking their territory, but you can't help to be impressed by the creativity street artists bring to some of the city's drab and unwelcoming infrastructure.  There's even a bus shelter, by Mario "Zore" Gonzalez. . .

. . . that would be a welcome relief from Bob Stern's joyless, thick-limbed constructions.

It's a great show, and this Saturday, January 11th, there's a closing weekend program, Chicago Street Art Stories:  1:00 p.m. in the Claudia Cassidy Theater on the Cultural Center's on the 2nd floor off the Cultural Center's north stairway. An open mic where you'll be able to hear many of Paint Paste Sticker's artists talk about their art and careers.  “The Exhibition catalog will be available and free for the taking.”

Here's our own gallery of some of Chicago's street art.  Some were temporary, others disappeared behind new buildings, many still endure for your enjoyment.

click images for larger view (recommended)

 

 

  

continue the survey, after the break

Last Chance to see Modernism's Messengers: Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli (complete with curator tour) , plus new Alfonso Iannelli monograph

Update [Tuesday, August 6, 5:05 p.m.):  It appears there has been a leak at the Block Museum.   All art work is being moved to a safe location.  Designing the Future has closed prematurely, and Saturday's event with David Van Zanten has had to be cancelled.


Still adding great stuff to the August Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

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Two essential exhibitions are entering their final days, and AIA Chicago is marking their imminent closing with two rare curator tours.  This Thursday, August 8th, Tim Samuelson will be leading a curator's tour of Modernism's Messengers: The Art of Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli, which closes Saturday, August 17th.  As we've written before, it's a don't miss overview on the often troubled lives and far-too-little known - until now - work of two important Chicago artists.

2013 is becoming the year of the Iannellis' rediscovery.  Late on Thursday the 8th, at the Cliff

Dwellers, there will be a book signing of the just published Alfonso Iannelli: Modern by Design, by David Jameson with an introduction by Tim Samuelson.  We hope to be writing soon about this marvelous, lavishly illustrated (350+ color plates), but Snap upyour copy now - I'm hearing the first printing is selling briskly.

There's an even shorter window to see another great show, at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum on Northwestern University's Evanston campus.  Drawing the Future: Chicago Architecture on the International Stage, 1900-1925, runs only through this Sunday, August 11th.

It's an arresting overview of the work of Marion Mahony, Tony Garnier and others. (Including one of those illustrations by Jules Guerin that launched Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago into the public imagination, where it has endured ever since.  Seen a rare opportunity to see it at its original scale, which gives a much bolder impression than the version folded into the book.)


This Saturday the 10th, AIA Chicago has also arranged for Drawing the Future curator David Van Zanten to give a gallery talk of his show, which is a great way to wrap up the run.

And while we don't cover architectural tours - there's just too many of them - on Sunday the 18th, the is mounting a South Side Jewish Chicago tour with Herb Eiseman and architect/preservationist Carey Wintergreen, starting in 1847's State Street, site of the Midwest's first synagogue, and heading down to Hyde Park and South Shore.  $40.00 for members, $45.00 non-members. Information here.
Chicago Jewish Historical Society

Even in the middle of summer, this next week is jammed-pack, with a screening of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth at the Graham on Wednesday the 7th, and the Japanese film Termae Romae at the Cultural Center Thursday and again on Saturday the 10th, the same day there's a panel discussion of Design Education at the Institute of Design at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, and Ilianna Kwaske talking about Behind Closed Doors: The Psychology of Our Domestic Spaces at MCA.

Also on Thursday the 8th, David Bagnall will talk about From Artistic to the Prairie Home: Domestic Interiors of Chicago's Gilded Age, at Fourth Presbyterian's Gratz Center.

We've also added a number of events tied in with the Cultural Center's show Spontaneous Interviews.  Add it all up and there's now nearly three dozen great items still to check out on the August Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

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What's Up? Monkeybutt!

Time travel fantasy:  Bring architect A.H. Coolidge back to life, blindfold him, and bring him up to what was the Reading Room of the Chicago Public Library he designed.  Remove blindfold.  Google Glass his reactions.  Put video up on YouTube.  Watch the views pile up.


There have been many interesting things set against the bordello-red classically ornamented Yates Gallery, but probably none have offered a more surreal contrast than the three giant inflated monkeys that are one part of The Happy Show, where graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister . . .

. . . not only tests the boundaries between art and design, he often transgresses it through his imaginative implementation of typography. The Happy Show offers visitors the experience of walking into the designer's mind as he attempts to increase his happiness via meditation, cognitive therapy and mood-altering pharmaceuticals. “I am usually rather bored with definitions,” Sagmeister says. “Happiness, however, is just such a big subject that it might be worth a try to pin it down.” Centered around the designer's ten-year exploration of happiness, this exhibition presents typographic investigations of a series of maxims, or rules to live by, originally culled from Sagmeister's diary, manifested in a variety of imaginative and interactive forms.

image: Chicago Cultural Center

To contextualize the maxims that appear throughout the exhibition, Sagmeister has gathered the social data of Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Steven Pinker, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, anthropologist Donald Symons, and several prominent historians. A 12-minute segment of the Happy Film, a feature length exploration of whether it is possible to train the mind the way we train the body, will also be on view.

While the bulk of exhibition is in the Yates Gallery, the density is in the adjoining exhibition hall, where yellow - the color of happiness? - predominates, through considerations of happiness through matters physical, intellectual, emotional, philosophical and sexual.  It's where you can participate in a poll of happiness by selecting a gumball.  And the giant monkeys?

And I expect you'll all agree
That he was right to so decree.
And I am right,
And you are right,
And all is right as right can be!
       -W.S. Gilbert, The Mikado

 

The Happy Show runs at the Chicago Cultural Center through Monday, September 23, 2013

More on the architecture of the Cultural Center, as backdrop to another intriguing exhibition:

I Am Curious, Morbid - an unnerving show finds the perfect architectural setting.

Creation and the Politics of Gender: Modernism's Messengers - the Art of Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli

 Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli -click images for larger view

The new show at the Chicago Cultural Center, Modernism's Messengers: The Art of Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli, echoes two current controversies - immigration and gender in artistic partnerships - in telling a fascinating story with two compelling, parallel hooks: rediscovering the work of sculptor and artist Alfonso Iannelli, and uncovering the vital, often inseparable role that his wife, Margaret Iannelli, played in its creation.

To begin, the story of Alfonso Iannelli is a portrait of the American immigrant experience.  Late in the 19th century, his shoemaker father had left Andretta, Italy to seek his fortune in the United States, and a few years later was secure enough to bring over the rest of the family, including ten-year-old Alfonso.  Soon, Alfonso was studying art in New York, and in 1906 he became an apprentice to Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who would later go on to create Mount Rushmore.

(click to watch on YouTube in a larger window)

According to the Tim Samuelson, Chicago's official Cultural Historian and the curator of the exhibition, young Alfonso was ripe for assimilating Borglum's philosophy, which was all “about the idea that America has to to find its own artistic voice.”

“Iannelli,” says Samuelson, “was very much an advocate of collaboration in all things, that society was full of strong individuals who work together to create a harmonious society.  He believed in the idea of democracy.  I think this all came out of his immigrant experience - the freedom of the individual to create out of himself, but then the ability of the individual to have interactions with like-minded individuals.”

By the time Iannelli decided his future lie in the Great American West and moved to Los Angeles, Margaret Spaulding was already there.  Another transplant from New York - she was born in Mount Vernon in 1893 - Margaret's family settled in L.A. in 1903.  “Even as a teenager,” says Samuelson, ”she was getting every foreign fashion and art magazine that she could. ”  By the time she was 16, she was teaching art, and shortly thereafter had carved out a career as an illustrator for fashion advertisements.  She continued her outside work even as she joined Alfonso's L.A.  studio in 1913.

“Margaret talked,” says Samuelson, “in a breathy voice and the men would be mesmerized by this beautiful blonde, dressed in these stylish clothes and talking about art in a whisper.”

The Iannelli Studios had gotten a commission to do posters - at $5.00 a piece - for the Orpheum vaudeville theater in downtown Los Angeles.

“The earliest posters,” says Samuelson, “were done on tinted cardboard, starting in 1912.  You see how they were made to read as a panel.  They had to crank these out, but they made these studies.  They knew what acts were coming and so they would try to plan to make sure that when they were placed in the cases the posters would relate to each other.”

It was a job ‘perfectly suited to Alfonso Iannelli's desire to put modern art in highly visible public places.  The posters conveyed the spirit and energy of the performers, instead of simple caricatures.’

The posters got the attention of Frank Lloyd Wright's son, John, and in 1914, Alfonso accepted an invitation to come to Chicago to work with Wright on Midway Gardens, at 60th and Cottage Grove.   During the five months he was away, Margaret continued work on the posters, and the designs began to show more of her artistic influence. “ She was looking at Art Nouveau,”, says Samuelson.  “She was looking at Secession.  Especially if you look at the Orpheum posters, there's nothing that's Wrightian in those at all.  If there was an article in The International Studio on Japanese art, she tore it out and she'd file it away.  The whole use of line and negative space, it's very much that.”

Alfonso Iannelli, studies for Midway Garden sprites

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Alfonso was working with Wright to create what the long-vanished Midway Gardens remains most famous for today - its striking ‘Sprite’ sculptures.  Several of the originals, plus a group of studies, are on display at Modernism's Messengers.  The Sprites are displayed on a raised platform that gives you a good idea of their original relationship to the viewer.

“They were never on the ground,” says Samuelson. They always looked down at you.”

“This one had a mast that came out of the concrete, and cubes of glass, kind of like those light fixtures at Fallingwater, and the light bulbs would stagger up.  They called this one the totem.  In an early description, it's also called the gift-giver, that it's greeting you and bringing you cascading flowers in a vase.  Midway Gardens was an experiment in merging art and culture.  Of course, it quickly went broke.”

The downturn at the start of World War I saw the gardens sold in 1916 to Edelweiss Brewing

Margaret Iannelli
click for larger view

Company, which converted Midway Gardens into a beer garden. “They painted the sculpture.  The gift-giver, instead of looking like she was bringing you flowers, was painted to look like she was bringing you foaming beer steins.”

The changes - and cheapening - gained only a temporary reprieve.  Not even an appearance by the legendary Pavlova could save Midway Gardens from the ravages of Prohibition.  It was demolished in 1929, bankrupting in the process two demolition companies who had underestimated the solidness of the construction, “Wright actually said he was happy to see it go.”

When the work at Midway Gardens was published, Iannelli was appalled to discover that Wright claimed all the credit for the sculptures himself.  A contentious correspondance ensued, resulting in a rupture that precluded any further collaboration.  When Alfonso returned to Los Angeles, however, the Orpheum posters ‘displayed a new aesthetic of geometric complexity deriving from Alfonso's experiences with Frank Lloyd Wright.  Flat geometric areas of solid color predominated the designs, often contrasting with areas of gold and jet black.’  While both Ianelli's embraced strong geometries in their work, that of Alfonso tends to be harder and more abstract.  Margaret's have more of a pulse of life.

On Valentine's Day, 1915, Margaret and Alfonso were married in Santa Ana.  Soon afterward, they moved to Chicago, setting up their studio at the top of Holabird and Roche's Monroe Building on Michigan Avenue.  By the time the Iannelli's, now with two children, moved the studio for a final time, to Park Ridge, Margaret was showing signs of mental illness. 

At times she would erupt into episodes of rage.  Periods of intense productivity alternated with times when she could make nothing at all.  On occasion she would disappear for days.

After a major breakdown in 1923, Margaret was institutionalized, first at a sanitarium in Wisconsin, then on farms in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.  She continued to take on projects, but she never fully recovered, finally being committed to Elgin State Hospital in 1929, where she would remain 38 years - more than half her life.  Her last works were a series of colorful illustrations for the hospital newsletter, painstakingly created by running the pages through the mimeograph once for each color.  The last known issue to include her work was in 1948.  “Details of Margaret's last nineteen years remain sealed in the medical records of the institution.”  She died, two months after breaking her hip, on November 29, 1967.  No one claimed her body.  She was given a pauper's burial in an unmarked grave.

It's uncertain if she even had known of Alfonso's death two years before.

After Margaret was institutionalized, Alfonso began to take on studio assistants, including Edgar Miller, Bruce Goff, and Ruth Blackwell, who would also become his new life companion.  His studio remained active during the 1930's, with a lot of work at the 1933/34 Century of Progress Exhibition. There were also the theaters - the Catlow in Barrington, and Pickwick in Park Ridge- but as the thirties came to a close, work dried up.  (Be sure not to miss the arrow pasted on one of the Cultural Center gallery's high windows, pointing to the view towards Iannelli's last major commission.)

“The irony” says Samuelson, “is he was trying to be the voice of modernism, but to the new voices in modernism - the Institute of Design and Moholy and the movements of the 20th century -Iannelli's work was much too figurative.  They were taking modernism into an entirely another direction.”

“In the end,” Samuelson says, ”there weren't many people seeking him out in the studio, and then suddenly he becomes the spokesperson for the Prairie School.  Instead of people coming to discuss the new trends and the philosophies of modernism and life, almost everyone was coming to talk to him about Frank Lloyd Wright and 1914.”  His last known poster was for an exhibition of the work of Adler and Sullivan at the historic Pilgrim Baptist Church, the former K.A.M Synagogue that burned to the bare walls in a 2006 fire.

When he died in 1965, Iannelli's ashes were buried anonymously in a Park Ridge cemetery.  He became news again in 2011, when his former design studio was threatened with demolition.  It was saved at the last moment when it was purchased by the Kalo Foundation and has now been preserved as The Iannelli Studios Heritage Center.

2013 is a year of discovery for the Iannelli's.  In addition to the show at the Cultural Center, next month will see the publication of Alfonso Iannelli: Modern by Design, a lavishly illustrated monograph by David Jameson.

Samuelson is a master storyteller, and in the Iannelli's, he has a great story to tell.  First, the Americanization of Alfonso - how, even before he came here, he was shaped by American culture, and soaked up its values and reshaped them with his own work.  And then, Margaret's story, which the Pritzker Prize's announcement that it will not redress its slight of Denise Scott Brown makes especially timely.  Samuelson's wall text lays out the story of Alfonso and Margaret in compelling and illuminating detail.  Hints are placed as to who was the dominant designer in certain works, but the observer is also often left to decide for themselves.

There is no question that the backstory of the rediscovery of Margaret and her role in the work of the Iannelli Studio lends a special poignancy to the exhibition.  Ultimately, however, the art must stand for itself, and here, it does.  This would be a great show even if the walls were bare of text.

It's a very sweeping display of many types of work, from graphics to sculpture, architectural renderings and ornament, illustrations, advertisements, furniture and even Iannelli's industrial work, including a patented design for a blender's glass container.

Tim Samuelson and appliances designed by Alfonso Iannelli

I don't want to oversell it.  We're not rediscovering a lost Picasso or Rodin, but as they said of Dvorak, if  the Iannelli's aren't necessarily at the top of the food chain, they are still second-rate artists of the first order.  In itself, their work is pleasurable to encounter.  In fostering an understanding of the history of early 20th-century art and architecture in Chicago and America, Modernism's Messengers: The Art of Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli is deeply rewarding.

Modernism's Messengers: The Art of Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli, in the 2nd floor Chicago Rooms of the Chicago Cultural Center, continues through August 27.