Lakefront Anonymous Book Cover with stone carving of a face

Lakefront Anonymous Book Release and Photo Exhibit Extended to Nov. 20 and 21

Join Aron Packer and me to help celebrate publication of Lakefront Anonymous: Chicago’s Unknown Art Gallery, our book about the thousands of vernacular stone carvings that line much of the city’s shoreline. We’ll be signing books as well as exhibiting some of the best images and giving talks about these magnificent works of art Saturday November 20 and Sunday November 21, 12-5 p.m., at 1100 Florence, Evanston. Talks at 2 p.m. each day. Aron and I have been discovering and documenting the carvings for decades, even tracking down a few of the carvers. The carvings, ranging from minimalist initials to

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The Mid Century Glories of Peterson Avenue

Peterson Avenue: A cynic might say it’s where Prairie style went to die, and I’d say, yes and an honorable death. The mid-century buildings on this commercial strip range from late moderne to proto-post modern, with lots of typical Mid Century Modern buildings in between, all showing a range of Prairie influences. Peterson, from Western Avenue west to Central Park Avenue, is a case where economic stagnation (as opposed to decline) might be the best preservative for under-valued architecture. I doubt whether Peterson was ever a hot neighborhood, and it’s hardly hot now. But it’s also not falling apart. There

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Hyde Park Lakefront Stone Carvings Under Threat

Chicago’s lakefront is lined with thousands of stone carvings, created by mostly anonymous makers over the course of the 20th century. One of its most carving-rich areas is also its most endangered. Hundreds, probably thousands, of carvings have been lost over the last 20 years as the city, in cooperation with the Army Corps of Engineers, has reconstructed its shoreline to prevent erosion and flooding. This has meant removal of limestone blocks once used to armor the shore — and thus also the carvings made on many of those same blocks. Now the city is moving ahead with plans to

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Morgan Shoal Stone Carvings: Imminent Danger

The hundreds of stone carvings at Morgan Shoal, between 45th and 50th Street in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, are in imminent danger of being lost. This section of lakefront is in terrible condition, with the many of the old rocks topsy turvy and falling into the lake. The city is following up emergency measures to reduce flooding with an initiative to fund its framework plan for complete reconstruction. The plan has appealing elements, including creation of additional parkland. However, it makes no reference to the carvings or their preservation, which is no surprise considering that public awareness of this artwork

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Promontory Point Stone Carvings Again Threatened

In the early 2000s the Hyde Park community succeeded (with then-Senator Obama’s help) in blocking a government plan to strip away the quarried step stones around Chicago’s Promontory Point and replace them with a new concrete-and-steel revetment. That important act of preservation incidentally saved the many stone carvings that reside on those blocks — several dozen of the thousands of the carvings that line Chicago’s waterfront. The concrete-and-steel approach to shoreline reconstruction was nonetheless applied from just north of Promontory Point up to Montrose Harbor. The “shoreline protection project” demolished several miles worth of the old step stones along with

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The Cross Garden

W.C. Rice’s cross garden art environment in Prattville, Alabama, near Montgomery, was one of the nation’s fiercest roadside views. The drift of his message was crystal clear, although the specifics were sometimes arcane. Rice, whose cross fixation extended to the large wooden one he wore around his neck, was said to be quite friendly to visitors. His signs and crosses stretched along two sides of the road. On one side was a shed that served as a chapel. On the other the signs and crosses filled a large vacant lot below a hillside trailer park that Rice owned. The messages

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Review: Gatecrashers

Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America, by Katherine Jentleson, University of California Press, 264 pages, 53 color photographs, 18 b/w illustrations, 2020. ISBN: 9780520303423. Hardcover, $50 Gatecrashers might best be described in terms more typical of a page-turner novel than an art book—it’s a story of tragedy and triumph, of drama and historic happenings. The overarching tragedy is the opportunity lost in the 1930s to open up the definition of art to myriad forms of creativity beyond the academy. That process seemed to be gaining momentum until it was precipitously halted in the early 1940s. It only restarted in earnest

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Review: Photo/Brut

Photo / Brut, by Bruno Decharme and others, Flammarion in collaboration with the American Folk Art Museum, New York, and abcd, Paris, 320 pages, 2020. ISBN: 978-2080204325. Hardcover, $55 Among the varieties of art brut creation, photography has historically received limited attention. A newly extensive, if not definitive, exploration built around the great ABCD art brut collection of Bruno Decharme takes some steps to remedy that situation. Photo / Brut, the exhibit and catalog, boasts impressive scale, and Decharme’s deep art brut experience gives him standing to help define what art brut photography might mean. That’s not exactly what this

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Review: Unheard Conversations/Carved Coconut Heads

Unheard Conversations: A Wonderful Collection of Carved Coconut Heads, by John Turner, Blurb, 72 pages, 103 color and 11 black-and-white illustrations, 2019. ISBN: 978-1714598229. Paperback, $85 Kitsch and art each have their virtue. Art, at least when recognized as such, is reputable, upmarket even when inexpensive, and trades on originality. Kitsch is disreputable, down market even when expensive, and trades on clichés. Yet kitsch can be fun, funny, and sometimes even meaningful. It is remarkably effective in evoking a time or a place or a feeling. Consider tikis, pink flamingos or Hello Kitty. It also can say a lot about a culture, revealing

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Roadside Art Tableaus

There are isolated bursts of brilliance all along Western Avenue and other working-class stretches of Chicago’s orderly street grid. And every once in a while you come across a building or a sales lot where the signmaker’s art gives way to something far more ambitious than a simple commercial illustration. Here are three examples — all gone now — where the signage adds up to a large-scale piece of art.

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