ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

various color choices available for restoring the “Charleston look” of a local building, but
also a timeline of U.S. and Charleston history (from 1660 to 1900) accompanied by a chart of
changing architectural styles of the region through the same period. This chart served as a
template for Ericson and Ziegler in their conception of a possible public art project for
Chicago. For more details on their Charleston project (entitled Camouflaged History), see the
exhibition catalogue Places with a Past, 176–181.
60 Mary Jane Jacob as quoted in “Urban Issues Are Focus of New Public Art Program in
Chicago,” undated press release, 1–2. The “other exhibitions of site-specific installation art-
works” that Jacob is referring to here are international in scope and include “Places with a
Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival,” curated by Jacob in Charleston,
South Carolina, May 24–August 4, 1991; “Project Unité,” curated by Yves Apetitallot in
Firminy, France, June 1–September 30, 1993; “Sonsbeek ‘93,” curated by Valerie Smith in
Arnhem, Netherlands, June 5–September 26, 1993; and “On Taking a Normal Situation and
Retranslating It into Overlapping and Multiple Readings of Conditions Past and Present,”
curated by Iwona Blazwick, Yves Apetitallot, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev as part of the
Antwerp ‘93 celebration in Antwerp, Belgium, September 18–November 28, 1993.
61 Joyce Fernandes, who took over leadership of Sculpture Chicago as its program director after
the conclusion of “Culture in Action” and the departure of Jacob, specifically tried to address
this problem in the next Sculpture Chicago program, “Re-inventing the Garden City”
(1995–1996). By pairing artists with community groups earlier in the process, Fernandes
hoped to engage community participation in the conceptualization of an art project at the pro-
posal stage. Because all the projects were determined to address specified public parks as
sites of social activity, potential collaborators were easily found around Washington Square
Park/Bughouse Square, Union Park, Garfield Park, and Humboldt Park. The community
groups were to “reinvent” a more clear-cut sense of identity and proprietorship over the
park’s territory and activities. But this made the collaborative process more difficult in some
cases, as the artist was pushed to the margins of the conceptualization process. Dennis
Adams, one of four artists involved in the “Re-inventing” program, dropped out of the project
due to unresolvable disagreements with community leaders at Garfield Park. The key issue in
such community-based collaborations seems to be the difficulty of striking the right balance
among the participants—i.e., the sharing of authority. Miroslaw Rogala, Ellen Rothenberg, and
Pepón Osorio were the other participating artists, and their projects at the three other parks
were on view from June 8 to September 7, 1996.
62 See, for instance, the comments of Eleanor Heartney in “The Dematerialization of Public Art,”
45–49; and Allison Gamble, “Reframing a Movement: Sculpture Chicago’s ‘Culture in Action,’”
New Art Examiner (January 1994): 18–23.
199
NOTES TO PAGES 120–123