In May of 2004 Paul Klein closed the door on his west-side gallery, Klein Art Works, and his 23-year career as a Chicago art dealer. He said his new ambition was to run a small museum, but by the end of that year he was the surprise choice to commission art for McCormick Place West, the billion-dollar expansion of what was already the nation’s largest convention center. Beating out experienced public-art curators for the job, Klein was handed $1.8 million to outfit the two-million-square-foot facility with Illinois art. He made his selections and notified the artists last fall and got the contracts signed in the spring, but it wasn’t until last week that the list of 30 winners was released.
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The project has kept a low profile. There was no official announcement of it or Klein’s appointment. He mentioned that he’d gotten the assignment in a column he wrote for Chicago Life (a New York Times insert) in February 2005 and made the project one of many topics discussed on Art Letter, a website he’d set up after closing his gallery. He says he sent out a lot of e-mails and posted open calls for artists online, which yielded “500 or 600 submissions, about 85 percent electronic.” He whittled those down to 65 and finally to 30, showing what he had at both stages to a review committee made up of McCormick Place staff, the building’s architects, a representative from the Illinois Arts Council, and city public-art head Greg Knight. But for at least some people in the local art community the opportunity was under the radar. Former Chicago Artists Coalition executive director Arlene Rakoncay says she’d only heard rumblings about the project before she stumbled upon it on Art Letter. She put it into the CAC newsletter, but says that by then it was “pretty late” in the process.
As for his other project, Klein says the commissions are a signal that McCormick is being more supportive of what goes on locally. Not only do all the artists represent Chicago and Illinois, he says, but their pieces do as well. That’s no coincidence: Klein directed them to create work about either the city or the state. Examples he cites include a Bronzeville narrative by Preston Jackson, a series of paintings based on Nelson Algren’s City on the Make by Dan Ramirez, a backlit photo of “every building on every site in the Loop” by Jason Salavon, a skyline by Paul Sierra, and a stack of Illinois turtles by Robert McCauley. They’d all qualify for Klein’s art museum.
Susanne Doremus
Karinne Fuqua
Cheonae Kim
Herb Migdal
