Seeing Double
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McDonald says Pier Walk juror David Pagel was OK with the cloning, and no one at the Lincoln Park show objected either. So the clunky twins are a visual link between the pier’s international event, which wound up with 34 pieces this year, and the ten-piece neighborhood exhibit that started as its antidote. Launched by Alderman Vi Daley on the suggestion of General Iron president Marilyn Labkon and run out of Daley’s office, mostly by her assistant, Barbara Guttmann, the clumsily named Lincoln Park Community Art Initiative is a nonprofit organization that exists solely to produce the 43rd Ward’s annual show of Chicago-area artists. Coincidentally or not, it cropped up last year on the heels of a change in Pier Walk policy that shut many local artists out of that show. While Pier Walk art is now selected by a single celebrity juror (this year that’s LA Times art critic Pagel), the Lincoln Park show is juried by–horrors–a group of neighborhood business owners, with help from Chicago public art chief Mike Lash and Millennium Park project director Ed Uhlir. Each business donates $2,500 for a sponsorship and gets one jury seat; this year there are ten sponsors, up from eight the first season. With the $25,000 plus in-kind donations, LPCAI put ten sizable sculptures on scattered sites throughout the ward this year and published a poster that maps them. Artists each got a $1,000 honorarium, which McDonald says won’t begin to cover the cost of producing, insuring, and transporting a piece like Flight. “There’s no money in this,” he says. “We’re like those lawn mower brigade guys. But I’m building stuff that’s gonna stick around.” His sculpture and the others in the show will stick around–for a year. LPCAI took its first exhibit down after six months; then, says Guttmann, “We figured out that it’s cheaper to bring the crane around once.”
Seeing Ghosts?
From Lakefront to Screening Room
