Chicago makes modern: how creative minds changed society

Abstract

Chicago Makes Modem: How Creative Minds Changed Society. Edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Jacquelynn Baas. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. xxi, 305, illustrations, index. Paper, $35.00.)Almost twenty years ago, I wrote an essay for the catalogue of the Museum of Contemporary Chicago's exhibition, Art in Chicago, 19451995, in which I argued that the time had come to recognize the difference between a history of art in Chicago and the history of Chicago art-the former being a vast landscape of practice the diversity of which was only beginning to be understood, while the latter was a consciously constructed brand identity for the city that focused narrowly on a tradition of dystopic Imagism spanning some two generations of post-WWII Chicago painting (Pride of Place, in Lynne Warren, ed., in Chicago, 1945-1995 [1996], pp. 53-68). Now, a new anthology, Chicago Makes Modem: How Creative Minds Changed Society, co-edited by Mary Jane Jacob, executive director of exhibitions and exhibition studies at the School of the Institute of Chicago [SAIC], and Jacquelynn Baas, director emeritus of the University of California Berkeley Museum and Pacific Film Archive, makes a valuable contribution to the more expansive history of art in Chicago by examining the city's deeply rooted ethos of progressivism in art and education and progressivism's continuing impact on artists active in Chicago today.In two sets of essays, one historical in orientation and the other contemporary, the book documents and supplements a year of experimental exhibitions and public programming sponsored by the SAIC in collaboration with the Mies van der Rohe Society at the Illinois Institute of Technology (inspired, according to Jacob, by the confluence in 2009 of the 100th anniversary of Daniel Burnham's Plan of Chicago, the opening of the Institute's new Modem Wing, SAIC's move into Louis Sullivan's Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company building, and a traveling exhibit on the German Bauhaus planned for the Museum of Modern Art, New York). But Jacob and Baas, who collaborated previously on the anthologies Buddha Mind in Contemporary (2004) and Learning Mind: Experience into (2010) have produced something far greater than the sum of its parts.The historical section of the book opens with an essay by Jacob on the like minded-ness of Chicago's great progressives, a tradition embodied by the activism of Hull-House founder Jane Addams, the instrumentalism of philosopher and educator John Dewey, and the materialism of New Bauhaus founding director Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. was crucial to the practices of all three, Jacob argues, as enrichment in the case of Addams, as enlightenment in the case of Dewey, and as ethics in the case of Moholy. Other essays reorient the theory and practices of Chicago's New Bauhaus relative to its German predecessor, reconfirm the centrality of Chicago architecture to the history of modernist architecture more generally, and expand our understanding of that tradition through investigations of visionary architects Buckminster Fuller, whose 1927 Dymaxian House was first featured in the Interior Decorating Galleries of the Chicago department store, Marshall Field's, and Chicagoans George Fred Keck and William Keck (Keck and Keck), whose House of Tomorrow and Crystal House, showcased at the Century of Progress Exposition, Chicago, 1933-1934, were harbingers of the green or sustainable movements in architecture today. …