CHICAGO — Nearly every summer in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, some genuinely dumb public art is trotted out for the entertainment of visitors and residents alike. Sometimes it’s life-size fiberglass cows, other times giant butterflies. The most dreadful ones are readymade kits of vibrant junk that cities can mail-order to jazz up their shopping streets and empty lots. Occasionally we get some brilliant stuff like Franz West’s weird rainbow boulders, not to be climbed on in Millennium Park.
Elmhurst, a municipality about 30 minutes west of downtown, currently has the worst of the worst and the best of the best, just minutes from one another. Near the town center are “Umbrella Sky” and “Color Rain,” temporary outdoor installations that can be found in multiple cities around the globe and purchased online from a Portuguese company. They offer a bit of color and movement for pedestrians to walk beneath, but they are also meaningless trash with zero local resonance and a passing resemblance to exciting car wash entrances.
Concurrently, the Elmhurst Art Museum is exhibiting CROSSINGS, a solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures by the Chicago artist Bernard Williams. Williams creates enigmatic canvases out of iconic materials and symbols, like Georgia dirt and Native American basketry patterns and speedway track flags, and he builds big, bold sculptures of tractors and airplanes. These last have been sited both inside the museum and out, on parkland accessible to all. Many act as monuments to historical figures and events, though if you were a kid playing in Wilder Park, on the south side of the museum, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Williams’s “Route 27” was simply a super-cool, cartoonishly angular, larger-than-life race car scrapped together from painted plywood. It might make you want to go home and build something awesome yourself. Anyone else would probably start wondering about the sponsor logos and team names plastered all over the vehicle. Some might be familiar: MIES for Mies van der Rohe, the modernist architect whose experimental kit house forms a wing of the museum; BOOKER T for Booker T. Washington, an emancipated leader of the Black elite at the turn of the 19th century; 1803 LP for the Louisiana Purchase. Others less so: YAZOO, KEOKUK, and ROSENWALD might require a Google search, ditto the number 27. FOX refers not to the television station but to an Indigenous people of the Midwest. JIM CROW FLOW should give everyone pause.
Williams, who was born on Chicago’s far south side in 1964, has been a stalwart of the city’s art scene for decades. Though primarily a studio artist, he has also worked for years with the Chicago Public Art Group, the legendary mural-making organization celebrating its 50th anniversary this fall, and his collaborative handiwork can be found in elementary schools and underpasses in various neighborhoods. Plenty of permanent solo projects are out there, too, in city parks and plazas, including a number of steel signposts that piece together cut-out words and images into meaningful configurations, less for geographical way finding than for cultural and historical orientation.
Two new 12-foot-tall steel signposts have been installed on the Elmhurst Art Museum’s north lawn, where they will hopefully remain for a long time. “Cowboy Dream” features silhouettes of a rooster, a pig, and a man in a Stetson, all painted black for the African Americans who helped shape the American West after Reconstruction, a story left out of most history books and Hollywood movies. “Spirit of Bessie Coleman,” painted white and yellow, includes a propeller, wings, and the face of a woman in aviator goggles. Coleman was the first Black woman pilot, and the first American of any race or gender to be licensed by the globally recognized Fédération Aeronautique Internationale. Williams also honors Coleman in a pair of indoor sculptures: a dreamy six-foot-tall bust, her hair futuristically coiffed into a trio of wings, and a full-size airplane, decorated with Coleman-esque iconography. Two triangle-folded United States flags rest on the hood, for Queen Bess, as she was known, who died falling from a plane in 1926, and the many other lost soldiers and heroes in whose ranks she belongs.
Unlike “Spirit of Bessie Coleman #2,” for which Williams bought and restored an actual kit plane, most of his vehicle sculptures have no hope of ever driving or flying anywhere. That’s a huge part of their charm. “Electric Car,” jigsawed from plywood, looks like a tween line drawing come to life out of sheer geeky excitement for the subject. “The Black Tractor Project,” a farm vehicle with a Black Power fist raised high in the driver’s seat, seems real but is basically carved from EPS foam. Painted black with a few Rothko-ish patches of rusty color, it commemorates the African American Farmers Settlement, a class action lawsuit that paid out $1.2 billion to Black farmers discriminated against by the US Department of Agriculture. Some of that money, the largest civil rights settlement to date, made its way to Williams via an inheritance from an uncle, a farmer in Montgomery, Alabama. Meaningful branding abounds on Williams’s tractor: instead of John Deere there is FANNIE LOU HAMER, 68, LAND IN, REPARATIONS, and USDA, and, lining the front tires, PIGFORD 1 and PIGFORD 2, for the official legal case names. A silvery African mask sometimes hangs on the hood.
“The Black Tractor Project” really ought to be permanently commissioned in bronze. That definitely isn’t going to happen under the Trump administration, whose idea of worthy public sculpture is exemplified by the National Garden of American Heroes, the proposed $34 million park to be filled with traditional figurative statues of Milton Friedman, Alex Trebek, and 248 others. But we can always hope — and learn, play, and experiment, all qualities that power those vehicles Williams fashions out of plywood and foam. For though they can’t actually move anywhere, they can move us far.
CROSSINGS by Bernard Williams continues at the Elmhurst Art Museum (150 Cottage Hill Avenue, Elmhurst, Illinois) through August 17. The exhibition was curated by Allison Peters Quinn, executive director and chief curator of the museum.
