Don’t loot Chicago’s cultural heritage by selling painting by Kerry James Marshall
Mayor Emanuel’s recent decision to auction off the Kerry James Marshall painting “Knowledge and Wonder,” commissioned in 1995 for the Legler Branch Library by the Percent for Art Program, may be well-intended. But it is wrong and must be reconsidered.
The aldermen who support the sale are right to support needed improvements to the Legler Library, and those improvements sound terrific, muchneeded and long overdue. But they shouldn’t be done at the expense of Chicago’s cultural heritage — especially an important, local artist who is just entering the world stage and whose work is about elevating the black experience, often in Chicago — into the art world’s historical canon.
Residents of West Garfield Park and the rest of the city, and tourists from around the world, should be able to see Marshall’s painting in the place that was intended for it when the painting was commissioned, just as the artist was establishing his career.
McCormick Place just auctioned off the city’s other Marshall painting and made a huge profit that will go towards “needed capital maintenance projects over the next 15 years at the convention center.” But why would you sell a unique cultural asset to cover normal operating expenses, especially when you can levy taxes and fees or float bonds to cover the cost, like Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority already does? That is looting our cultural heritage for short-term gain. And now the city wants to do the same at Legler, depriving us all, now and into the future, of a unique, site-specific masterpiece.
Chicago’s public art ordinance needs to be updated to cover the process of deaccessioning (officially removing) city assets, with public involvement in that process. At the very least, the city should bring back the Public Art Committee and address deaccessioning of the collection in the ordinance. This proposed auction can’t be a backroom deal to sell off the city’s patrimony, throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Mayor Emanuel knows how to raise money. He did it for bike paths along the lakefront, and he can do it for the library system. It’s not too late, and we are better than this.