ArchitectureChicago PLUS

Sunday, June 28, 2026

Sunday, May 31, 2026

On the 100th anniversary of her birth. Marliyn, Forever

June 1st 2026, marks what would have been Marilyn Monroe's 100th birthday. She's now been dead far longer than she was alive, yet her claim on our imagination endures, never grown old, frozen in time at 36.

In 2011, J. Seward Johnson (1930-2020), set free to follow his artistic pursuits through his status as an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, created a 28-foot-high, 34,000 pound steel and aluminum sculpture, Forever, Marilyn, depicting her in the iconic pose from the film The Seven Year Itch, her skirt blown up around her from a gust emanating from a New York City subway grating (not included). Originally situated as one of a series of supersized-installations by the sculptor on Chicago's Pioneer Court, it evoked both protest and delight.

The next year, it was moved to Palm Springs, California, part of a long odyssey that saw the film star's doppleganger travel to New Jersey, Australia, Connecticut, and, eventual dismantling and storage in a New Jersey warehouse. In 2021, she was rescued to take up residence back in Palm Springs, and there she has stayed, the centerpiece of a Great Palm Springs Palm Event this past weekend shattering a previous Guiness world record for Marilyn impersonators with 1,037 participants. According to Christina House in the L.A. Times, a $75.00 registration fee got each attendee "a white dress, platinum blonde wig, cat-eye sunglasses, and a martin glass to complete with iconic look."

Photograph, Christina House, Los Angeles Times

For a brief number of days, well over a decade ago, she was ours, an erotic, earthy, super-human counterpoint to the hard, angular stone, steel, glass and terra cotta surfaces of the towers all around her. Now, as with the enigma of Marilyn herself, she belongs to the ages, or least to Palm Springs.

Marilyn's aura and image remains a potent symbol to appropriate, from trying to lease chronically empty space in the Equitable Building . . .

... to Andy Warhol, reproduced in a Jeff Zimmerman mural on the blank wall of the old Saks Fifth Avenue building on Michigan Avenue.

I haven't checked. Does she still haunt the facade of Carnivale on Fulton?

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J. Seward Johnson sculptures ARE PEOPLE!!!! A Chicago Survey

Over 15 years, the sculptor J. Seward Johnson created a large number of works for Chicago, mostly temporary installations, and largely situated in Pioneer Court, the large public space between the Gothic Tribune Tower to the north, the steel-and-glass Equitable Building to the West, the Chicago River to the south (and since 2019, the Apple Store), and Michigan Avenue and the Spanish-styled terra-cotta-clad Wrigley Building to the West.

2008, King Lear, Pioneer Court. (since 2009, at Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton New Jersey)