Is Gardening an Art?
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According to Kelley, the Park District, at the direction of naturalist Shirley McMayon (who last year pleaded guilty to pocketing kickbacks for Park District contracts), ripped up his artwork without notice. In the fall of 2004 he filed a lawsuit seeking $10 million in damages plus legal expenses and restoration of the garden. He says Wildflower Works, planted at no cost to the city, maintained by volunteers, and requiring almost no watering, made Millennium Park’s multimillion-dollar Lurie Garden, with its caged trees and automatic sprinklers, look bad. He’s charging the Park District with breach of contract, unlawfully taking his property (the plants), and violating the federal Visual Artists Rights Act, which protects artwork from mutilation. Slated for trial next month, his suit will test whether a garden can qualify for protection under VARA, which defines an artwork as a painting, drawing, print, sculpture, or photograph.
In 1983 Kelley presented his plan to Park District head Edmund Kelly, and a permit to proceed was issued the following year. The project was greeted with much hoopla. Kelley planted more than 200,000 wildflower plugs in 47 varieties on 1.5 acres at a cost estimated in his lawsuit of about $100,000. (The nursery owner who supplied the plugs, a supporter of the project from its earliest stage, was paid in paintings.) The design echoed Kelley’s work on canvas, with twin ellipses that promised an ever-changing palette as different plants came into bloom. The Park District issued documents repeatedly touting the garden as a “living piece of art” that was “cost-effective and low maintenance,” and prominent Chicagoans Marian Ogden and Joanne Alter launched Chicago Wildflower Works, Inc., a volunteer organization that would tend to it. In 1985, after it had begun to flower, the state senate issued a proclamation congratulating Kelley and the Park District on their work. Chicago’s garden-as-art generated national press, including a spread in the New York Times.
Miscellany
