A Chicago photographer reaches her late-in-life prime
Suzanne Seed documents COVID-19 from her home as late husband’s drawings are exhibited in Evanston
Suzanne Seed was talking one recent sultry morning, sitting outside and contemplating life and loneliness and creativity. “I am doing amazingly well,” she said.
One of the many reasons for this sunny disposition is the exhibition of her late husband’s drawings at Evanston’s Noyes Cultural Arts Center through September. “Overheard Conversations with Myself: The Talking Sketchbooks of Art Paul” consists of 40-some striking drawings on the walls of a second-floor gallery, most all black and white.
“I was so moved by many of these sketchbook images and his writings,” says Angela Allyn, the community arts programs coordinator for the City of Evanston and a friend of Paul and Seed for many years. “There is an inherent humanity in these pieces, one that acknowledges failure, frailty, mortality, and the bittersweet humor and grace that marks a life thoughtfully lived.”
Some of the drawings contain words:
“History is constantly nagging.” “Listening to shadows, we start hearing things.”
“There is no better time than time spent discovering.”
“Just moving, who needs anything more.”
The show is, much like the man who created it, modest but compelling.
“Art was so humble,” said Seed. “He was also loving and playful. And sentimental. Every year since we were together, he made for me special holiday and birthday cards.”
Art Paul died early on a Saturday morning in 2018 after 93 wildly creative, successful and influential years. Born on the Southwest Side and raised in Rogers Park, his father died before his first birthday and he fell under the influence of his older brother Norman, a talented artist.
“He taught me how to look at the world around me,” Art once said.
He attended Sullivan High School and earned a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After serving in the Army Air Forces during World War II, he enrolled at the Institute of Design and then began his career in a small Loop office.
He will, like it or not, always be best known for one drawing he made at that time. It was 1953 and in a now legendary one-hour flash of inspiration, he drew the famous bunny logo at the birth of Playboy magazine. It would become as famous and recognizable as any logo of the 20th century, something that sits in the collective consciousness of the planet alongside McDonald’s Golden Arches, Disney’s Mickey Mouse, Apple’s apple or Nike’s swoosh.
He was hired by Hugh Hefner to be Playboy’s first employee and as its art director he was responsible for filling Playboy’s pages with a certain kind of magic during its first three decades. Not only did he oversee the quality of the photographs, trying, as he said, “to make the girls look more real and less plastic,” he was responsible for the rest of the magazine’s look, turning it into a captivating canvas
for artists. He commissioned the work of famous ones such as Salvador Dali, helped nurture a new generation that included Andy Warhol and LeRoy Neiman and such Chicagoans as Ed Paschke, Shel Silverstein, Roger Brown, Ellen Lanyon … there were hundreds more.
He retired in 1982, saying, “I’ve done all I can do here, I think”
He and Suzanne were married by then, having met in the late 1960s. She was a photographer-author-poet then working as an executive secretary at the Chicago Sun-Times, where Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers) introduced her to the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin. He arranged for her to meet Art.
“He was so kind and positive. He made me coffee,” she said. “Over the next years as I was freelancing, I would pay him visits and coffee led to dinner and …”
They married in 1975 and moved into a new city skyscraper, where she still lives, in an apartment filled with books and art. There are famous artists’ work all over but most of the art there is that of her husband.
After leaving Playboy, he spent some time with music (“piano pounding” he called it), taught a bit, designed for magazines,
advertising, television and film. He served on the boards of the Museum of Contemporary Art and other institutions. He was a member of the Art Directors Hall of Fame and won hundreds of awards.
“Even as his sight began to fade, he kept at it,” says Seed. “He would play with what’s happening, with the distortions that his macular degeneration was causing. He never really intended his work to make it into exhibitions or books.”
But he was always creating, drawing every day, thousands of drawings filling dozens of sketchbooks. He had modest exhibits at the Chicago Cultural Center and Columbia College and three years before his death there was a substantial show, “Hard Heads, Sweet Knees, Forked Tongues” at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, that handsome facility on Chicago Avenue.
It featured nearly 120 of Paul’s creations, work done mostly over the previous decade, even as his eyesight began to fade because of macular degeneration, a condition that did nothing to diminish his desire to draw or the power of his work. “He would always say to me, ‘You should see what I see,’ ” Seed says.
He also sat still for filmmakers making “Art Paul: The Man Behind the Bunny,” a documentary for which I provided the narration.
Seed has been spending much of her pandemic time cataloging her husband’s work. There is so much of it, and she anticipates more exhibitions and there are books in the planning stages.
“It feels like I am collaborating with Art,” she said.
She has also been busy with her own creative pursuits. She is a lively 81 and has for years been taking Chicago Dramatists’ classes and written three full-length plays — among them “Alice in Epidemia” and “Outing the Trolls that Ate the Internet” — and nearly a dozen shorter pieces.
Perhaps her most compelling and striking work is a series of photos she has been taking out the windows of her high-in-thesky apartment. “When we first moved in, I thought to myself, ‘I can’t see trees from here’,” she said. “It wasn’t until the pandemic arrived and I became a hermit that I started to really see what was out those windows, the ways the light played with the buildings, with the city. The buildings became like company, like neighbors.”
Those views are striking, beautiful and haunting.
Allyn feels this way and says, “I will be scheduling an exhibit of Suzanne’s photography for two reasons: her documentation of the isolation of COVID, where we all lived in these goldfish bowls separated from normal daily life but able to access the world out a window or online, speaks to the fundamental hope of the artist. And Suzanne’s eye finds monumental beauty in a world just beyond her glass. It encourages each of us to look deeply and closely at the things most familiar to us, and to love them.”
Seed, attracted by the way the sunlight was hitting a nearly fountain took out her camera and said, “This is not work, it’s fun. I am proud of these photos, and I really have to think ‘How did I get better at my late age … just like Art?’ ”