Considering that 5 1/2 years ago they thought it would take, oh, maybe a year to get the job done, you can imagine there’ll be some celebration Thursday night marking the completion of the restoration and renovation of the chapel of the St. Scholastica Priory, 7416 N. Ridge Blvd.
In fact, on Dec. 13, 1992, when Tempo wrote about the work in progress-a painstaking and passionate refurbishing that started with crumbling, once-magnificent frescoes and expanded to every lightbulb and plank of red oak in the sacred space belonging to the Benedictine Sisters of Chicago-the saws and hammers and paintbrushes were due to be ditched by last spring at the latest.
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But then, you know how renovations go.
“For all practical purposes, we’re finished. Now we’re using it. People are rediscovering it. There’s a quieting of yourself when you go in there,” said Sister Rita Nowak, head of the convent’s chapel committee and one of the nuns who, under the directorship of artists Joseph Ramirez and Sean Culver, rolled up her sleeves and did her share of sawing, hammering and refinishing. “It’s time now to formally bless the project and celebrate.”
And the nuns aren’t leaving out a soul. They’ve invited every single pair of hands that left an imprint on their prayer chamber; in all, 350 invitations went out. Never mind there are only 75 chairs in the chapel.
Undoubtedly, the two front and center seats will go to Ramirez and Culver, who got the job in 1988 when they plucked a help-wanted notice from a bulletin board at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since they first erected their scaffolding on July 1 of that year, the two have become fixtures in the chapel.
Part of the reason the task took so long: Ramirez and Culver painted with 1-millimeter-wide red sable brushes. “It took a couple months to do a 1-by-1 1/2 foot square,” Culver recalled. The frescoes, originally painted between 1938 and 1950, are thought to be the largest and most unusual examples in the U.S. of a bold German liturgical style of painting called Beuronese.
“Every hour I loved,” said Ramirez, who not only restored the frescoes but also designed and built the altar, lectern and tabernacle, as well as crafting the model for the flock of chairs.
Now that it’s all over: “There’s a sadness,” he said. “But there’s a time to move on to the next project. It’s going to be very strange not to go on a scaffold and paint whenever I go there.”