Chicago Artist Boycott and the "Richard J. Daley" Exhibition

By Maggie Taft

In 1967 Chicago introduced what have since become two of its most well-known monuments to American artistic culture. In August "The Chicago Picasso," a 50 foot Cor-Ten steel sculpture by Pablo Picasso, was erected in the Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago. Two months later, in October, the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in an old bakery at 237 East Ontario. The first exhibitions held there were Projects for Monuments, playful sketches by Chicago-raised artist Claes Oldenburg and Pictures to Be Read/Poetry to Be Seen, featuring work by twelve artists, some, like James Nutt, based in Chicago and others, like Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell working on the East Coast or abroad. It is nothing short of surprising that just a year later Oldenburg was spearheading an artist's strike on the city—a reaction to the aggression perpetrated by the city government forces at and around the Democratic National Convention in August of 1968.

Print publications reported conflicting accounts of the violence but the specifics were irrelevant. Footage of tanks rolling down Michigan Avenue and police using, what the Walker report called, "excessive force," was broadcast on news stations across the country. Newspapers and magazines, local and national alike, were collaged with images of the violence that had ensued. Two artists, Hedda Sterne and Jesse Reichek, who was also a History of Art professor at Berkeley, decided to respond with their own images...or an absence of.

Sterne and Reichek organized an artist's strike on the city. 50 artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, James Ernst (son of Max Ernst), Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Motherwell, agreed to participate in what was to be a two-year boycott of Chicago's art museums and galleries. The strike was slated to finish in 1970 when Daley's term as mayor ended. The artists sent a telegram to Daley, in which they explained the purpose of their protest. Their statement, later published in The New York Times ("Artists Agree on Boycott of Chicago Showings," Sepember 5, 1968) and re-printed in Art in America ("The Politicization of the Avant-Garde, II," March/April, 1972) read as follows:

The recent actions by Chicago police, directed and supported by Mayor Daley and not repudiated by the people of Chicago, have marked that city as being unfit for membership in civilized society. As painters and sculptors we know that art cannot exist where repression and brutality are tolerated. As citizens we have seen art lose its value when police power is allowed to go unchallenged. Silence condones: We have not forgotten Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. We express our disgust and revulsion by refusing to make available any of our work for exhibition in Chicago, at public or private galleries, for the next two years. It is our hope that by then the people of Chicago will have discarded their present political leadership and will have restored that city as a fitting environment for our work.

Many of those involved took action immediately. Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith withdrew plans for a piece intended for the University of Illinois Chicago's downtown campus. Claes Oldenburg pulled his exhibit Proposals for Monuments from the Richard Feigen Gallery. Oldenburg told Time Magazine that "a gentle one-man show about pleasure" was "a bit obscene" for the time. Barnett Newman requested that his painting, Gea be removed from the traveling "Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage" show to open at the Art Institute after closing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In his letter of request for withdrawal, Newman wrote to C.C. Cunningham, Director of the Art Institute, that he did "not wish to be represented in this exhibition in protest against the uncalled-for police brutality of Mayor Daley," and that he could not "in good conscience do otherwise." A city that responded to critique with, as Newman put it, "the cracking of heads," could neither see nor sustain the new ideas and alternative approaches put forth in painting and sculpture. Silence was the chosen solution. In certain ways, the Chicago Artist Strike was intended to preserve the revolutionary character of art. Keeping silent was intended to show that art, like protest, could not be passively received.

But on October 23, less than two months after the boycotters had sent the telegram to Mayor Daley, the Richard Feigen gallery, left empty after Oldenburg pulled his show, opened an exhibit that included work by many of the artists involved in the strike. The show was titled The Richard J. Daley Exhibition and the art was intended as a direct response to the August events. The New York Times called it a more activist approach than silence. A total of 47 artists engaged in this artistic activism and 21 of them created new work specifically for the show. Among these were James Rosenquist's Tattered Image, Barnett Newman's Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley, and a number of fireplug pieces by Oldenburg.

Newman's symbolic sculpture Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley, now in the possession of The Art Institute of Chicago, was a distinct formal departure from his ouvre, consisting primarily of abstracted zips and broken obelisks. Here, in the Lace Curtain piece, a barbed wire construction framed in thick steel and splattered with red paint, his political orientation was made blatantly manifest. The barbed wire was a direct reference to that which had surrounded the DNC meeting hall in order to keep dissenters out. In his essay "Barnett Newman: Broken Obelisk and Other Sculptures," art historian Harold Rosenberg explains that while Newman's painting aimed to achieve "the silent presence of an object...in refusing to represent anything on his canvases...in order to transform the canvas itself into a thing," a sculpture is "by its nature already a thing, so Newman could permit it to take on the suggestiveness of a symbol." According to Rosenberg. the rectangular grid had been pulled from Newman's typical practice vocabulary and so allowed the Lace Curtain to deliver "a political blow without abandoning the artist's customary format, in other words while remaining a work of art."

The same was true of other artists works included in the show. Along with a 48 piece series of sculpted plaster fireplugs, Oldenburg submitted two of his drawings for proposed colossal monuments of Mayor Daley's head on a platter. Time Magazine named them "Daley on a platter" and the artist adopted the title. This type of work had obvious precedent. In addition to his sculptural work, Oldenburg's catalogue was dominated by drawings for gargantuan monuments of typically banal objects, monuments that were never intended to be erected. The original show he had planned to exhibit at the Richard Feigen gallery that autumn had primarily consisted of this kind of work. But the Daley on a platter pieces also had a formal forbearer--in 1965, Oldenburg had sketched Brancusi's Sleeping Muse, 'headlight, a pen and pencil drawing of sculptor Constantin Brancusi's sculpture of a bodiless head turned on its side, to be recreated as a soft sculpture. The Daley on a platter plan mimicked this 1965 sketch verbatim.

The following year, this sketch reappeared on the walls of the Richard Feigen gallery. In the spring of 1969 Oldenburg exhibited Constructions, Models, and Drawings, a revised version of the Proposals for Monuments show. The reworked exhibition was dominated by sketches of fireplugs, the symbolic form of the city according to Oldenburg, and its forbearers, including a drawing of a limp punching bag. "The punching Bag is an even more paternal form and one of my favorite disguises---when I was punched during the cop terror in Lincoln Park, I assumed this form," Oldenburg wrote in the exhibition brochure. Both he and Feigen had themselves been targets of brutality during the infamous police riots of the previous summer. In his letter requesting that the Proposals show be postponed, a letter that also served as the advertisement for the "Daley" exhibition, Oldenburg explained that he had been "tossed to the ground by six swearing troopers who kicked and clubbed (him) and called (him) a Communist." Constructions, Models, and Drawings revealed both Oldenburg and Feigen's ambivalence to the city they had previously so celebrated.

There is a copy of the Constructions, Models, and Drawings exhibition pamphlet kept in the closed stacks at the Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago. There is another one held by the Art Institute of Chicago. But there is no trace of the Richard J. Daley Exhibition in either place. As the New York Times explained, the show was regarded more as a display of activism than of art. And so it has been excluded from (art) historical archives. In its place are brochures from the Feigen gallery's more typical exhibitions like the revised Oldenburg show and the Old Masters and the Modern Environment exhibit held a few years later.

Yet, the Richard J. Daley Exhibition did have an impact. Newspapers nationwide reported on the show, which, after closing in Chicago, traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and then Feigen's gallery at 141 Greene Street in New York, where it was later reprised in 1988. And Daley certainly took notice too. According to Feigen, some of the Mayor's 'goons' trashed the exhibition. Nevertheless, it's proven but a blip in the story of Chicago's political history. Just ask the special collection's archivist at the Harold Washington Library. "We don't have anything about that," she told me, "We're primarily a history collection. We don't have those sorts of arts related things."