More than a few people were surprised when Joe Davis opened a contemporary art gallery in Highwood last April. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that Highland Park’s tiny neighbor to the north–covering about one square mile–had a reputation as a rough-and-tumble bar town. For much of the 20th century as many as 30 saloons did business within a couple of blocks (a fact that locals claim once earned Highwood a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records). Today 35 restaurants stand where the bars once did, and the Town of Fort Sheridan residential development has helped send Highwood’s property values soaring. But with its narrow streets, modest homes, and hodgepodge of tired, mismatched buildings downtown, it’s still another planet compared to the posh suburbs that surround it.
He left Jewel to become a salesman for a food broker, but after a year, realizing he “needed” to paint full-time, he quit and applied to the School of the Art Institute. His acceptance into SAIC, which requires the submission of a portfolio, was a pivotal experience. Until then art had been a solitary passion: “I didn’t share it or seek encouragement. I had no idea if I was good or bad.” Being selected was a sign that “what I was doing was right.”
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A while back Lenny Innocenzi, owner of Buffo’s restaurant, a block north of the gallery, noticed the benches decorated by Gallery 37 students that are scattered throughout O’Hare. Inspired, he teamed up with Davis to launch a public art project in which 24 local artists used wooden benches as canvases. The benches were placed throughout Highwood’s business district last summer. Eighty-five-year-old Highwood artist Emilio “Babe” Galassini decorated one with cherries, strawberries, carrots, lemons, pears, garlic, and pumpkins–sponsored, appropriately enough, by the Nite ‘n Gale restaurant, where it still sits out front. (Galassini’s intricately painted wood-and-papier-mache chicken and goose eggs are on display at the Highwood Public Library.) Another Highwood artist, Peter Demma, created a bench out of concrete and cedar; it weighs over 500 pounds and rests in front of Davis’s gallery.
The town does have an artistic tradition to draw on: the Italian immigrants who arrived here in the early 1900s were artisans and skilled craftsmen–stonemasons, woodworkers, and bricklayers, who helped construct the mansions that sprang up along the lakeshore. They were also artists. The best known was Aldo Piacenza, who came to the U.S. around the turn of the century and eventually operated a coffee shop across the railroad tracks from where Street Level Gallery stands. At the age of 65 he began making birdhouses and paintings that paid homage to the villages, churches, and mountains he knew as a child in Italy. A few years before his death in 1976, the Hyde Park Art Center exhibited 200 of his works in a show curated by imagist Roger Brown; now the Smart Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the School of the Art Institute all own Piacenzas.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Saverio Truglia.
