Lowell Thompson Lectures
The last time the Reader heard from adman turned artist Lowell Thompson, he was getting ready to take on segregation in the city’s museums and galleries. He planned to stand in front of the Art Institute in a sandwich board and offer to unveil his own work to passersby. At 8 AM on a bitterly cold February day he gave it a try, donning his signature black eye patch and a sign that read to see some art, just ask. The response was icy: tourists, willing to pay $12 to cruise the Art Institute’s collection, gave him the cold shoulder, and locals bent on getting to work were unstoppable. It was a learning experience, he says.
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This new gig also required some hustle. Thompson had noticed city art honcho Nathan Mason frequenting a Starbucks in Uptown and began speaking to him there. “I told him, ‘I’m an artist: I’d like a crack at that Loop studio,’” Thompson says. “I didn’t think he took it seriously.” But when Thompson scored an exhibit at the Bezazian Library in September, Mason showed up to hear him talk about it, and soon after that offered him one of the Loop space’s monthly residencies. Mason says he’s been filling the slots on an ad hoc basis because the city’s selling the 1872 landmark building. (A planning department spokesperson says final negotiations are under way with Marc Realty; the city will soon offer less-visible artist residencies in the pedway beneath the Chicago Cultural Center.) He remembered Thompson speaking up at a meeting about the city-run Chicago Artists Resource Web site and says he thought he would do a good job of engaging the public in the Open Studio.
Thompson then turned his energies to Partnership Against Racism, a nonprofit he founded in ’93 and ran with Derek Simons, a white Catholic priest who also joined Thompson as cohost of the award-winning Sunday morning radio program The Race Question on WLIT FM. The organization, which aimed to conquer racism (through advertising and other media) by the year 2000, lasted about five years; Thompson, who admits paperwork is not his strength, says it got to the point where “to blow it out and make it much bigger, I would have to become more of a bureaucrat.” He chose to let it fold.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Flynn (portrait).
