Jan Cicero fell under the spell of abstract art as a teenager in La Grange in the 1950s, when she was introduced to the work of trailblazers like Jackson Pollock by an enthusiastic high school art teacher. This kind of painting–work that grabbed the viewer on a level deeper than the surface image and revealed itself at its own slow pace–was more mysterious and powerful than any other art she knew. She began to think of herself privately as an artist, but there weren’t any female role models, she says. “My mother’s activities were sewing circles; my father wondered whether I’d be a teacher, nurse, or secretary.” At Wheaton College, she found that while the music department was strong and music was respected, the art department and art were not. She majored in education and became a phys ed and dance teacher. At 21 she married her high school sweetheart, Frank Cicero, who was headed for the ministry.
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But Frank had a change of heart about his career. While he worked on a master’s at Princeton, Cicero taught at a private school for girls, Miss Fine’s, where she found the all-female environment enlightening. She read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and hung out with “women my mother’s age with PhDs.” Back in Chicago, she continued to teach while Frank attended University of Chicago Law School, then took a hiatus when her daughter (the first of two) was born. By the late 60s she was at Northwestern University, ostensibly for a master’s in education. She signed up for an elective–a studio class in advanced oil painting with George Cohen–and had her own change of heart. Despite some personal doubts about her talent and drive and the isolation of working in a studio, she’d be an artist after all–this was her world. A couple of years later, when she took a Chicago art survey class with Corey Postiglione (now of Columbia College) at the Evanston Art Center, she found her real place in it. “He took us around to the galleries showing local contemporary work, and there weren’t very many of them–almost nothing for abstract art. I thought, this is interesting–maybe I could do this.”
Cicero will close her gallery at the end of next month. She’ll pull back to the Evanston house where she started, doing a little curating and private dealing. In the 29 years she’s been in business, she’s hung only what she loved–whether she thought it would sell or not, and regardless of the fact that both painting and abstraction have been out of favor for big chunks of that time. “I wasn’t interested in conceptual art, photography, or video,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to have the next big thing. I was showing art that might not have been seen anywhere else.” She says she has no idea how much money she’s sunk into the business; it never supported her, and seldom sustained itself, but that was never an issue. Frank Cicero’s law career at Kirkland & Ellis has subsidized what she thinks of as a cultural contribution to the city. “I didn’t have to make a living at it, and that was a great luxury.” There’s nothing very dramatic about her life, she says: “This is the story of a woman of a certain age following her heart and having the good fortune to be able to do it.”
