One of Kerry James Marshall’s first reactions to news that Chicago intended to sell a public library mural he painted was to swear off making any more public art.
“It just seemed like a way of exploiting the work of artists in the city for short-term gain in a really shortsighted kind of way,” he said of the plan to auction off “Knowledge and Wonder,” which Marshall painted for the Legler Branch public library on the West Side, in order to reap an expected multimillion dollar windfall that would pay for upgrading the Legler. “And so I made a decision at that time I would never do another public work.”
But now the news has changed. Mayor Rahm Emanuel revealed in a Tribune story Sunday that he responded to criticism from Marshall and others by pulling the painting from its announced Nov. 15 auction and will return it to the Legler.
The directors of Chicago’s two leading art museums praised the mayor for his about-face and for ultimately seeing the value in a powerful work of art. Emanuel said his change of heart was guided in large part by Marshall’s expressed disappointment and that he called the artist to try to explain his thinking and to tell him how it had evolved.
So is the man the Museum of Contemporary Art recently called “one of America’s greatest living artists” reconsidering his proscription on making art for civic places?
“I’ve done about all the public art I think I really want to do,” the 63-year-old South Side artist reiterated in a phone interview Sunday evening from the Bronzeville studio where he has continued to work even as prices for his paintings have climbed into the stratosphere. “The work I do now, I want to be less accommodating and less compromising … There’s too many contingencies that go with public art, and there are more compromises than I think I’m going to be willing to make from here on out.”
The interview focused on the controversy over “Knowledge and Wonder,” a roughly 10-by-23-foot canvas depicting African-American children standing before the enlightenment offered by books, and on an artist’s responsibility to his city and vice-versa. What follows is an edited version.
Tribune: It’s great to talk to you and especially under such positive circumstances. How are you feeling about this?
Marshall: (Chuckles.) Well, it’s amazing how things change. It’s an interesting turnaround. I think it was the right decision to make. On some level you have to understand that not everything that can be sold should be sold. The fact that the work was owned by the city didn’t mean the city had a right to sell it, even for the reasons they claimed they were going to sell it for. The value of an artwork isn’t just what money you can get for it. Sometimes things have a little bit more intrinsic value than that.
Q: What was your intention in making it?
A: That piece, because it was made for that library, it belonged in that library. It wasn’t just a picture. It was a very specific thing for a very specific place. … You never expect public works to be sold at any time. And so it was a surprise on a lot of levels that that work was going to come up for sale.
When you make a work like that, you hope it has a certain sort of instrumentality, that it can be used for something. Thematically, it’s an invitation to enter a world of knowledge and imagination. It’s structured in such a way that for anybody who’s looking at it there’s no barrier to entering the world that those books open up. The spectator is as much a part of that galaxy of incredible and informative things as the people in the picture are. I feel like it was well laid out.
Q: And now that the story is known, there’s a whole ‘nother level of imagination there too. A kid can look at it and say, ‘Hey, this famous painting, extremely valuable, was painted by a guy who grew up in housing projects like perhaps I am.’
A: Yeah, I think that’s true. Every time I do a talk at a museum, I give my kindergarten teacher credit. She introduced me to the power of images in scrapbooks she put together. She didn’t have any idea what impact that was going to have. But she made it in the hope that it would have some impact on somebody. It had a profound effect on me. My interest in images came from that experience. So I know something about the value of just simply having access to things, to seeing things. The kinds of things that I want that mural to do is show a range of possibilities of things that you can experience through books. And maybe there’s some kid out there who started looking at more books because of that, and who knows where that leads?
Q: When you commented briefly about this in London early last month, your words were sharp. (Marshall told ArtNews, “I am certain they could get more money if they sold the Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza.”) Were you feeling as pessimistic as you sounded at the time?
A: On some level you say, if the city owns it and they want to sell it, legally they could. They paid what was asked for it at the time ($10,000) and as far as I remember there weren’t any stipulations on the contract that said it could never be sold. It was shocking that it came so close to the sale of the piece that was in McCormick Place (Marshall’s “Past Times,” from the convention center’s collection, sold for $21.1 million in the spring). It just seemed opportunistic that the only reason it would be considered for sale was that somebody else had made a lot of money on something, and they thought they could make some money too. That kind of transactional behavior just seemed really off-base.
I was minding my business trying to do what I had to do to get my show up in London. I didn’t have any idea any of this was going on until we got urgent messages there saying they needed to talk to me. And at the time they said that was going to be good news. But when I found out what the intentions were, it seemed a bit exploitative — and especially since I had just in 2017 finished the dedication of that mural on the Cultural Center (“Rush More”) for which I was asked to get no money. So it just seemed like a way of exploiting the work of artists in the city for short-term gain in a really shortsighted kind of way. It certainly would make one believe there’s no reason to do anything because you have some kind of civic pride as a citizen. That civic pride could be turned to some other kind of purpose by people who seemed to not have much civic pride. And so I made a decision at that time I would never do another public work.
Q: At that time you decided that?
A: Oh, yeah. There would be no reason to do public works, especially public works that could be moved, because at any opportunity that work could be seen as nothing but cash on the wall … I mean, why give away work that somebody else means to make money on?
Q: Have you revisited that decision?
A: No. I’m pretty firm. I couldn’t understand why anybody would think that (‘Knowledge and Wonder”) was simply transferable to another place. I couldn’t understand how anybody would come to the conclusion that it was just like any other kind of picture.
Q: So the way Mayor Emanuel paints this now it’s — he didn’t use this term — but essentially that he had a sort of crisis of conscience as he was swimming and realized that he could not go through with this. Did that come through in your conversation with him about his decision to change his mind?
A: I spoke to him and he began with an apology. He said that it was a mistake. He said he didn’t even know the piece existed in the city’s collection, but when he found out, he said that since nobody said anything about the piece being sold from McCormick Place that he thought this would be okay too. Well, the McCormick place piece, it was a completely different thing. It’s not site specific. From everything I heard from everybody who had anything to say about it, really, it was universally condemned as a bad idea.
Q: Well, in a way, it’s another version of the city’s parking-meter sale, right? There’s certainly a different kind of civic value to a work of art, but you’re selling off a long-term asset for, as you say, a short-term gain.
A: When you talk about cultural assets, the reason I started with the Picasso is if you really just want to make money, then you should take something that you can really make some money with. So even if the painting sold for what the auction estimate was, that’s not any money when it comes to establishing programs and providing services to a community of people who you feel had been left out. The amount of money you could get for that was going to be gone before you know it. In the grand scheme of things, in the way cities work, 10 or 15 million dollars is no money.
Q: So do you take heart in this reversal, or does it still sting that you’re even in this situation in the first place?
A: I’ve got a lot of stuff I want to do. I didn’t want to have to be worried about it’s being sold. That wasn’t something that was on my mind until it was brought to me. Once it was, it was disturbing. Even if your intention was to provide more service to the community, you don’t take something that’s an aesthetic asset from the community and give them something else. It says they don’t deserve to have art, especially if it looks like it’s some art that’s worth something. ‘They can’t have that over there.’ That’s the short-sightedness of the proposition.
You don’t know that the work is going to become a valuable asset. I mean it’s just been a strange phenomena that a particular work of mine grows so quickly to a level that nobody had ever anticipated. That first sale was way outsized. The “Past Times” painting, that was a particular phenomenon at a moment that was out of the ordinary. … (But) when people think that a thing is worth a lot, they pay a little bit more attention to it. And I think what you want is for people to pay more attention to it. You want that to become a thing that people will go to the Legler library to see, even if it’s just to gawk at for a time or two.
Q: I’ve wondered about this from the start of this whole scenario. Do you think there is an element of cultural disrespect in all of this, that on some level because you are a black artist and it was in a black neighborhood, that it was seen as something that the city could treat differently?
A: I can’t really speak to whether that’s the way people in the city think about it generally. But I will say politicians have never been known for having a particularly sophisticated idea about what art is. Not since I’ve been here. And historically black communities have always existed on the margins of what happens in the art world. The art market is not driven by black collectors. The gallery scene in Chicago has almost no black-owned galleries. So you could make an argument that there’s a perception that art doesn’t really matter so much to black people and in black communities because it doesn’t circulate within the community at the same kinds of values that it circulates in what we call the mainstream community.
Q: Which gets back to the point of what you’ve been trying to accomplish with your work all along.
A: It’s always been a mission of mine to have the work respected enough to enter into museum collections, and in that regard you could also say public collections, where the work was available to the widest possible audience without having to make a special kind of effort to encounter it. And I think one of the things that happens when you have an artwork in a public library is that people can have a casual relationship to it. And the other thing that I think is really important: That piece had been there for 25 years, nearly. And nobody has bothered it. So it wasn’t likely that it was going to be destroyed or torn up or messed up simply because people now think it’s worth something.
Q: I loved the quote from the librarian in my piece where she said essentially, ‘We didn’t know what that painting was, but people just looked at it and liked it because they thought it was a beautiful picture.’
A:Yes. And to me, that by itself is a reason why it should stay there.
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
