If Chicago were a person, this time of year would definitely constitute a bad hair day.
No, it’s worse than that: This time of year would constitute a frumpy-bathrobe, droopy-sweatpants, drool-on-the-chin, up-at-3-a.m.-with-the-flu kind of season.
My fellow Chicagoans, we may as well face it: February is not an especially lovely month for the city. Snow is stacked in gray, greasy hunks along residential streets; often, the ragged tops of these mini-Matterhorns are festooned with empty Doritos bags. Ice lingers stubbornly in the alleys. Dirty ponds form at curbsides. The sky is the color of a ditchdigger’s pants cuff.
Is this the impression of Chicago that visitors should take home with them, along with that Cubs T-shirt or Bulls bath towel?
Of course not. That is why the idealistic souls overseeing the Midway Airport expansion chose to display 43 works of art in the pedestrian bridge linking the terminal with the parking lot and CTA line.
Come spring, the bridge over Cicero Avenue will be home to ticket counters and concession areas, as the first phase of Midway’s expansion is completed, said Allyson Murphy, coordinator of the city’s public art program. Right now, though, the bridge is lined with plywood walls, behind which laborers pound nails and string wires and install ductwork.
On those plywood walls hang the pictures, each framed by thin strips of wood painted bright blue, as if surrounded by shards of sky.
The works, all by Chicago-area artists and selected last year from a juried competition, are a motley lot. Some are funny, some are serious, some are impressive and others are — is there a polite way to put this? — not.
But what counts is that they’re there at all. What counts is that as Midway’s 15-million-plus annual visitors lug their bags to and from the terminal, among the first and last images of the city they see at ground level are art, not ice and grime.
The display is not part of the city’s percent-for-art ordinance, the 1978 edict requiring that 1.33 percent of the budget for constructing or renovating any new city facility be devoted to the purchase of art for that facility, Murphy said. Instead, it’s just a good idea that didn’t cost anything, since Southwest and ATA airlines donated the prizes for the winners in the professional and student categories: round-trip airfares to any destination.
Among the most arresting pieces is Ina Greenfield Beierle’s “Chicago Revealed,” a mixed-media work that looks like fossilized remnants of the city’s tangled essence.
Pause in front of Catherine Lange’s “Flight” and you will be reminded of the astonishing volatility of clouds. Her photographs of the view from an airplane window are proof that the sky suffers from a multiple-personality disorder, that it can suddenly and inexplicably switch identities.
Peter Volay’s “Infrequent Flyer,” a parody of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” is a slyly funny transplantation of the famous couple to Michigan Avenue. Volay took first prize in the professional category; Beierle won the student division.
As the renovation continues — the unveiling of the new Midway is scheduled for the end of 2003–the pictures will move along with the plywood walls that accompany each construction phase.
It isn’t the best art in the city, and given the hasty nature of visits to this particular gallery, it may not be the most memorable. Yet in a season of early dusks and drab colors, it’s a visible hint of spring.
The artists, Murphy added, were free to express themselves and faced no restriction on subject matter — with one understandable exception: “No crashing airplanes.”
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