There’s something startling, all right, about local artist Josh Garber’s planned sculpture for the revamped Kimball station on the Brown Line, but it’s not the phallus some people claim to see. Anyone who finds this loopy pair of columns pornographic better avert their eyes from the entire Chicago skyline. Garber says his inspiration was the lotus, which a Cambodian immigrant told him represents “hope and renewal,” the piece’s title. In his proposal for the work, Garber notes that it’ll be made of thousands of welded aluminum bars, “meant to represent each of the individuals living in the area,” while the petals, which double as benches, point to the four corners of the earth. Images of the model, which is now on display at Zolla/Lieberman, suggest vegetation by Dr. Seuss–shiny skinned and weirdly organic. The columns will be out of sync with the station’s modern architecture, but here’s the real eek factor: the price of these doodads is $113,000.
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That’s not an exorbitant amount by public-art standards, and includes installation costs, but that’s not all. Art’s in the works for four additional Brown Line stations at $68,000 each: Evanston’s Thomas Skomski will do Rockwell, Chicago’s Ellen Rothenberg has Western, and artists from New York and LA got Francisco and Kedzie. Decoration has also been commissioned for seven stations on the Red Line at $90,000 a pop. A total of 25 Red and Brown Line stations are slated to receive major new site-specific works, and that’s on the heels of a cool $1 million spent on nine pieces for Blue Line stations last year.
Arts in Transit isn’t the CTA’s only strategy for station enhancement. In 1997 it launched the Adopt-a-Station program, which encourages groups, businesses, and residents to commission art and take responsibility for individual stations for two-year periods. Twenty stations are currently operating under this program, including the Green Line’s Conservatory-Central Park Drive station and the Brown Line’s Merchandise Mart stop, which in recent months have featured mosaic murals by neighborhood children and photography by Columbia College students. Take a look at the images of the newly commissioned Brown Line art and decide for yourself if it’s 70 or 100 grand better than stuff made by a bunch of kids.
Miscellany
