Being one of the Crown Fountain faces may be considered cool these days, but back when it was time to create that particular sub-community of Chicagoans, Mery Palarea-Lobos, 34 — who is from Guatemala and recently graduated from the arts administration program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — was not so sure how things would work out.
There was no model to follow for getting people to lend their faces to a public fountain. But that was her assignment. “It is a strange request,” she says. “. . . I think the toughest part, because of the way things are in the world right now, is that a lot of people don’t trust.”
And people also had no idea what in the world she was talking about.
“It was a leap of faith to assume that people would participate, because there was nothing to show them — everything was variable,” she says, referring to the initial three-week shoot, which began in late July 2003, before the fountain was even built. “We could try to describe it, but it was so hard to picture in your mind.”
She started her somewhat random pitch with phone calls to local organizations, then followed up with official letters. Initially, she says, it was like pulling teeth.
“I started with community-based arts groups, for obvious reasons, because I thought they’d be eager to convince . . . but they weren’t. It was actually very funny. They were like: `no, we don’t participate in that kind of thing.’ . . . I won’t say all of them, but I didn’t get a great response.”
“Then I started contacting social-service organizations. And then immigrant organizations. And I had a great reaction. At the end I also contacted consulates.”
About 60 of the 180 community-based groups Palarea-Lobos contacted sent people, delivering an impressive sampling of more than 800 local faces to that first shoot, which took place seven days a week for three weeks in a School of the Art Institute studio. And apparently, vanity was not the lure: everyone was informed of one particular aspect of the artist Jaume Plensa’s vision, which dictated the faces appear on the fountain randomly — therefore, they might never actually see themselves in lights in Millennium Park.
By the time the second shoot rolled around, this past May, they videotaped about 300 people in three days.
“It was completely different because the towers were there,” says Palarea-Lobos.
Thanks to word of mouth, some VIP participation, and Plensa’s request that all the workers who participated in building the fountain be shot, they had no problems filling the remaining slots to assure they had 1,000 faces, the final number Plensa decided upon. And while the duration has not been decided, some participants were told their faces could be shown for 50 years.
“I was thrilled,” says Palarea-Lobos. “We got first-generation Chicagoans, brand-new immigrants, people whose families have been in Chicago for as long as they can remember. And we got a pretty good range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds.”
“I remember being amazed by the range of people I met in such a short period of time . . . and I witnessed standards of beauty you don’t see every day,” she says. “That was one of the neatest things I got from the project. You know how diverse Chicago is, but you don’t really know until you’re got them right there in front of you.”