That’s No Way to Treat a Lady
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Two of the sculpted hands had been damaged; one had had all its digits chopped off. Some pieces were picked up by a sharp-eyed pedestrian and brought to the Art Institute early last year, but conservator Barbara Hall says that the sculpture was beyond the point where she could do anything. “It looked like someone kept taking a sledgehammer to it,” says Park District historian Julia Bachrach, who’s shepherding the reinstallation. Now it sits in a Park District warehouse while Bourgeois, who’s 93, carves two new hands in her New York studio.
Activists weren’t really surprised by the memorial’s demise. “We were happy to have a park named after a woman–there were so few of them–especially a prominent woman who did so much for so many people in the city,” says Erma Tranter, executive director of the watchdog group Friends of the Parks. “But it didn’t work out. The sculpture never had the prominence one would expect of Jane Addams.” Adds Rosalie Harris, president of the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents, “From the get-go, SOAR was very disappointed with the installation. Some people called [that area] the Pit.”
Neither Bachrach nor Hall could say how much it will cost to restore the Jane Addams monument, which Bourgeois is expected to finish by this summer. It’s not even clear yet who’ll pay for it, though the Ferguson Fund does have an annual maintenance budget. Reinstallation could be another matter. Strobel says that if the piece were to end up at the Hull-House Museum, “money would have to be found” to redesign the courtyard. –Jeff Huebner
The book’s big break, however, can be attributed to two people with no ties to Punk Planet: the Barnes & Noble fiction buyer who ordered 4,700 copies–more than the entire first printing–before Meno’s tour had even started, and the manager of the chain’s “Discover Great New Writers” series, who singled it out for the program’s holiday promotion.
