The Fine Arts in Illinois

TRADITIONALLY, MOST ART IS PRODUCED in cities, and this has certainly been the case in Illinois. The production, teaching, and exhibition of art in Chicago dominates the state. But larger cities such as Rockford, Kankakee, Peoria, Aurora, Champaign-Urbana, and Carbondale have their own histories of art as do the river towns of southern and western Illinois. While this essay focuses on those media traditionally regarded as “fine,” that is, painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking, Illinois also has a long history of wide-ranging creative achievement in many more media, including photography, decorative art, and craft.Fine art in Illinois can be traced to the eighteenth century. The household inventory of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the first non-Indigenous person to live on the site of present-day Chicago, included artworks. Although Illinois had itinerant portrait painters from the time of the early republic, the first professional artists appear in 1850s Chicago, including the portrait painter G. P. A. Healey and sculptor Leonard Volk. Both organized city art exhibitions and founded art academies. A substantial amount of art was shown in Chicago's two Civil War-era Sanitary Fairs organized to benefit soldiers and veterans.Because Abraham Lincoln's pre-presidential life occurred in Illinois, there exists the greatest concentration of paintings and sculptures of him anywhere in the country. His hometowns of New Salem and Springfield feature several important outdoor statues and much two-dimensional art. Similarly, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum displays and houses thousands of works of fine art, many by Illinois artists. Chicago also boasts art-historically significant sculptures of Lincoln, including Augustus Saint-Gaudens's two statues. But in the late twentieth century, Decatur sculptor John McClarey created more Lincoln-related statues than any other.Indeed, Illinois is graced with a great deal of public, outdoor sculpture, much of it art-historically significant. The well-known and prolific Lorado Taft taught at the School of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago and produced public fountains and large-scale works across the state. His students included Charles Mulligan, Leonard Crunelle, Nellie Verne Walker (see fig. 1) and the women sculptors (dubbed “the White Rabbits”) who helped create the copious architectural sculptures at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Other Chicago fairs, including the African American Jubilee of 1915, the Century of Progress exhibition (1933–34), and the American Negro Exposition of 1940 featured a wealth of fine art to illustrate American and Illinois history. Art in the form of sculptures, painted portraits, murals and decorative arts are also found in abundance in Illinois courthouses and government buildings. The Illinois State Capitol in Springfield (1888) is particularly grand, but many county and municipal courthouses also feature impressive artworks, often by Illinois creatives.The Art Institute of Chicago has been a force for art in Illinois. For much of its history, it collected and exhibited the works of regional artists. At the time of the World's Columbian Exposition, the museum was advised in its purchases by the Impressionist Mary Cassatt, who also painted a mural for the Women's Building. Illinois, perhaps fittingly given the French origin of its name, is now home to one of the most important collections of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism outside of France. Art museums in Illinois contain artworks of national and international renown including works such as Grant Wood's American Gothic, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, and Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (all at the Art Institute of Chicago). The Illinois State Museum in Springfield houses the most extensive collection of works by Illinois artists.Chicago's important School of the Art Institute (founded in 1866) attracted scores of important artists, including women and people of color, many of whom, like Georgia O'Keeffe and Archibald Motley Jr., became teachers or artists of note. The prolific, world-renowned Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt (1935–2023) was both a student and instructor there. Abstract, organic outdoor sculptures by Hunt, the first African American artist to have a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, are found throughout the state and the country. Today, university art programs and accomplished instructors bolster the arts in Illinois. They include Northwestern University, Columbia College, Bradley University, DePaul University, Loyola University, the University of Illinois (all locations), Illinois State University, and several others. These universities also have galleries and museums that host regular exhibitions and arts-related programming. Several have robust collections of the works of historic and contemporary Illinois artists. At the level of state government, the Illinois Arts Council and Illinois Humanities have been crucial to the support for the arts along with several arts-friendly governors.Illinois artists were particularly active during the Great Depression, when President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) subsidized them to create public art. The state ranks second only to New York in the number of murals painted in schools, post offices, and government buildings. In the mid-1960s, African American artists on the South Side of Chicago painted a mural composed of Black heroes: the Wall of Respect (demolished). Relatedly, the Mexican mural movement in this country had one of its most intense flowerings beginning in the 1970s in the Chicago Hispanic neighborhood of Pilsen. The National Museum of Mexican Art, also in Pilsen, displays the work of historic Mexican artists, many of them from Illinois.In the mid-twentieth century, Chicago avidly sought the public sculpture of prestigious modernist artists such as Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso. That tendency continued in works such as Anish Kapoor's contemporary Cloud Gate, dubbed “The Bean,” a colossal, polished stainless-steel sculpture in Millenium Park. Chicago's 1999 Cows on Parade exhibition featured custom painted fiberglass cows in various spots. Touted as the largest public art event in history, it was imitated in other Illinois locales and worldwide. Beginning in the late 1970s, public art was a mandatory expense in state municipal building projects.Illinois, and particularly Chicago, has been an incubator of important “outsider” or self-taught artists including Henry Darger, Lee Godie, and Joseph Yoakum. Surrealism found a receptive home in the state as exemplified in the paintings of Julia Thecla and Gertrude Abercrombie. In the twentieth century, Chicago artists have spawned movements of national significance including the Monster Roster, the Hairy Who, and the Imagists. Their irreverent art was figural, non-abstract, and inspired by “low” sources such as comics and advertising. Leon Golub, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and particularly Roger Brown represented these movements.Overall, the richness, diversity, and historical significance of the fine arts in Illinois is genuinely a cause for celebration.