Suzanne Seed is moving, downsizing it is called, as she transfers from one large apartment to a smaller one on the same floor of the downtown high rise in which she has lived since 1975.
Both apartments are far above the city, 75 stories above, and their large windows offer stunning views of streets and sky, clouds and buildings, trees and the occasional window washer.
Seed lives alone now and has since the 2018 death of her husband. He was 93-year-old artist Art Paul, a man best known for having created the famous Playboy Bunny logo. As that magazine’s first employee as its art director, he was known for being an innovative, influential and nurturing force there from the first 1953 issue until retiring in 1982, saying, “I’ve done all I can do here, I think.” He was a grandly talented artist, active nearly to his end.
“His eyesight was fading but he kept at it,” says Seed. “His macular degeneration was causing distortions but that did not diminish his desire to draw or the power of his work. He would always say to me, ‘You should see what I see.'”
Being alone was hard but Seed occupied herself with organizing an exhibition of her husband’s work, archiving his materials that will be donated to the University of Illinois Chicago, and collaborating on a documentary of his life (“Art Paul of Playboy: The Man Behind the Bunny”) and on a book about his work.
Then came the pandemic and her loneliness intensified. To combat it, she focused on the outside world, the world through her windows.
“When we first moved in, I thought to myself, ‘I can’t see trees from here,'” she told me. “When the pandemic arrived, I became a hermit, felt like a prisoner. I started to really see what was out those windows, the ways the light played with the buildings, with the city. The buildings became like company, like neighbors.”
She began taking photos with her cellphone, with telephoto and wide-angle, and posting them online. They were remarkably artful and eye-grabbing, even haunting.
This picture-taking was no mere diversion but rather an extension of a lifelong passion. Seed has long been a photographer, as a student at Indiana University, Yale University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has won awards for her work, which has been published in Time, Life, Playboy, Mademoiselle, the Tribune, CBS, the Sun-Times and Daily News. She exhibited in the U.S. and internationally. She has published two photo/interview books.
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Now, there are more than 30 of her photos on the second-floor walls of Evanston’s Noyes Cultural Arts Center in a show titled “Wonder Window: How Memorializing My City from Three Blocks Above, and During the Pandemic, Transformed Me.” This was the idea of Angela Allyn, the community arts programs coordinator for the City of Evanston, who runs the gallery.
“I actually forced her to have this show, twisted her arm,” says Allyn. “I had seen her work and I told her this was the only spot we had open this year, so she just had to do it.”
Seed was flattered but says, “I wasn’t in a hurry. There were a lot of other things to do but Angela is very persuasive and I am very happy with the show.”
This gallery was the same that had exhibited her late husband’s “Overheard Conversations with Myself: The Talking Sketchbooks of Art Paul” in 2021, 40-some striking drawings, most all in black and white.
Of this new show Allyn says, “Suzanne’s eye finds monumental beauty in a world just beyond her glass. It encourages each of us to look deeply and closely at the things most familiar to us, and to love them.”
The show has attracted some of those who know Seed from her long participation in Chicago Dramatists’ playwriting classes. (She has written three full-length plays, one titled “Outing the Trolls that Ate the Internet,” and a dozen shorter pieces).
One of those classmates, Kristin Lems, wrote about this show for the Evanston RoundTable, “The images encompass a stunning range of angles, colors, shades and images, and they feature such dramatically different weather, times of day and cloud formations that it’s hard to believe they were all taken from the same apartment.”
The Noyes exhibition has an essay written by Seed that says, in part, “What’s made me a photographer is awe and love of the visual world … The stakes in this project made it seem transcendently more personal. It became an adventure of connection — with clouds, streets, buildings-under-construction to get up-close-personal with, and window-washers I could wave at. And in the process I was astonished to see myself — at an advanced age — transforming as an artist.”
Seed is in her early 80s and there is already interest in remounting the show at Coda Gallery in Palm Desert, California. By then Seed is likely to be fully moved into her new apartment, with its new windows and a new world just outside.
“Wonder Window” runs through Feb. 13 in the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes St., Evanston; free, more information at www.cityofevanston.org