THE ART INSTITUTE'S 77th EXHIBITION BY ARTISTS OF CHICAGO AND VICINITY: WORKS ON PAPER

A black-and-white photo of the 70 x 77 inch oil and pencil on paper painting Indiana Cropduster by George C. Clark
as it appeared in the exhibition catalog.
(Photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Image copyright 1978 George C. Clark.)

In the previous post I told how I came to paint Indiana Cropduster and submit it to the jury for the Chicago and Vicinity show.  I'll continue the story...

Competition was fierce for the Art Institute's semi-annual Chicago and Vicinity shows.  Over 1500 entries were winnowed down to fewer than a hundred selected by the jury.  I was delighted to get a letter announcing that my painting had been selected and a loan agreement contract for the exhibition.  (Here is a sidelight I found interesting about the loan agreement.  Art that is handmade by an artist is insured for its sale price while at the museum, but art that is thought up by an artist and then fabricated by a foundry or cabinetmaker is only insured for the cost of the materials and labor to fabricate a new replacement.)

As the exhibition neared I was even more thrilled to receive a phone call from Esther Sparks, curator of the exhibition and one of its three jurors, who told me she hoped I would be at the opening reception because my painting had been chosen for a major award.  Later she called again to tell me that my award was the Peat, Marwick, Mitchell and Company Purchase Award, and that the giant international accounting firm was buying Indiana Cropduster to hang in their Chicago corporate headquarters.  (This firm has since changed its name to KPMG.)  Apparently the jurors select the prizewinners, then sponsors are allowed to purchase prizewinners and have their names on the awards.  This was a huge break for a young unknown artist, to be exhibited in a world class art museum, to win a major award, and to have my work purchased for a prestigious corporate art collection!

But it got even better.  At the opening reception I met Esther Sparks and mentioned to her that I had been showing work at the Art Institute's Art Rental and Sales Gallery for almost four years.  She said that she was the curatorial advisor to the Women's Board of the Art Institute, the volunteer organization that ran the Art Rental and Sales Gallery in the lower level of the museum (where the photography galleries are today) to raise funds for the museum and to promote Chicago artists.  She said they were starting a new program of using part of their space for a series of two-month exhibitions featuring two artists each time drawn from their regular roster of exhibitors.  They were planning to pair a maker of wall-hung art with a sculptor for each exhibition, and did I want to do an exhibition of large landscapes there?  Did I ever!  Indiana Cropduster was the only really big landscape I had done at that point, but I had some time to work on the project and I got busy right away.

I got some more big sheets of heavy hand-made Japanese toyoshi paper.  With their rough deckle edges trimmed, they gave me a working area of 40 x 70 inches, big enough to be impressive but a lot easier to mount and frame than Indiana Cropduster.  I did two vertical paintings, one a night scene of a cement elevator on the waterfront in Waukegan looming over an empty parking lot that I called Mathon's Parking Lot, and one of the empty space downtown next to the Chicago River surrounded by high-rises where the city kept a big glistening mountain of blue-tinted salt for use on icy winter streets titled Where Salt Comes From.  I will show you both of those paintings in future posts.  The third painting I finished in that series was a horizontal landscape of the farm in Delphi, this one showing my wife's uncle in his tractor discing a field of corn stubble with her grandfather's old yellow house visible on the horizon.  I called that one Fall Plowing.

The Chicago and Vicinity show ran for several months in the fall and winter of 1978-9.  Toward the end of its run I got a call from the Art Institute putting me in touch with collectors interested in my work.  It was a young lawyer and his wife from Glencoe.  They told me they liked Indiana Cropduster so much they would have bought it if it hadn't already been sold, and asked if I had any more big landscapes.  I invited them to my home/studio to see the three new unframed paintings I had finished at that point.  They purchased Fall Plowing.          

I regret I don't have a decent photograph of Fall Plowing, but the only slides I had were ones I shot inside the Electric Cycle studio where the lighting was really bad and they were spoiled by visible glare.  Speaking of photos, the black-and-white picture at the top of this post was shot by the Art Institute's photographer for use in the exhibition catalog.  It was shot through the plexiglas without any reflections or glare.  That's the work of a real pro.  And, unlike the color photo in my previous post, it is in sharp focus.