In the front room of Mr. Imagin-ation’s supremely cluttered second-floor Wrigleyville apartment, piles of flea market bric-a-brac and stacks of newspapers and half-filled packing boxes fight for space with a dozen or so wooden sculptures. Mostly about three feet high, they’re similar to the works Mr. I has been exhibiting since the early 1980s: totemic human figures festooned with bottle caps, painted plaster, discarded paintbrushes, and other scavenged materials. Their dark-skinned faces are bearded and bright eyed, making them look like a procession of African princes.
He wonders whether Warmack will be able to sell as much art living in Bethlehem. But, he says, “he’s been living in less than a satisfactory situation, and I realize he has a better deal there. I wish him the best.”
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Concrete sculptor Phil Schuster has worked with Warmack on outdoor installations in Chicago and Milwaukee–Warmack calls him the “best artist in Chicago nobody knows about.” Charmed by Warmack’s “divinity and sincerity,” Schuster has brought students to Mr. I’s place on field trips. “He encourages everyone to find their artistic niche,” says Schuster. “There’s a little bit of Mr. Imagination in me.”
“I think it sucks,” says K.C. Welch, a collage artist who met Warmack four years ago during a show at Uncle Fun on Belmont. “He’s had a huge influence on me–he’s such an open, friendly guy. He’s an institution in the art world, and everybody knows him. I never ever thought he’d leave, ever.”
This isn’t Warmack’s first turning point. In the summer of 1978, at the age of 30, he was shot by robbers near 63rd and May, a few blocks from his apartment. He arrived at Saint Bernard Hospital in critical condition and fell into a six-week coma. One bullet was removed, but another is still lodged close to his spine. A story persists that the comatose Warmack had a vision of his previous lives–as several African kings, including an Egyptian pharaoh–and that when he regained consciousness he started making art, incorporating images from those lives. Warmack says he did have such a vision, but it was before the shooting. And he’d been collecting things and making art from an early age.
A 1994 exhibit at the Terra Museum, “Reclamation and Transformation: Three Self-Taught Chicago Artists,” launched another facet of Warmack’s career: large-scale public commissions. The following year he and the show’s other two exhibitors, David Philpot and Kevin Orth, along with several other artists, worked with kids to transform a vacant lot adjacent to the Elliott Donnelley Youth Center at 39th and Michigan into a community art park. Warmack’s contribution, Meditation Grotto, was a concrete shrine embedded with stones, fossils, and other cast-off articles. Since then he’s created installations at House of Blues clubs in Chicago, Las Vegas, and Orlando, at Walt Disney World, and in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympic Games. “It’s too bad I never got a chance to build something in downtown Chicago,” he says.
“That’s when the community fell in love with Mr. I,” says Girardot. “I think it was in the fall [of 2000] that he finally made up his mind to live and work here with the community and college students.” Girardot doesn’t think he’s exaggerating when he says, “It’s a pivotal moment in the outsider art world. There was the death of Howard Finster, and now Mr. I moving to the east. I think we all have to step back and go, ‘What does this mean?’”
