CLOUDS FIND NEW HOME
Longtime mural at financial exchange building moving to University of Chicago
Ruth Duckworth’s “Clouds Over Lake Michigan” isn’t a typical mural by Chicago standards.
For one thing, it’s not a painting or a mosaic.
“It’s made out of ceramic, a mixture of stoneware and porcelain,” says Laura Steward, curator of public art at the University of Chicago. The school’s Smart Museum of Art will be hosting an exhibition on the late artist in September.
“For those two materials to be mixed is kind of unusual,” Steward says.
Duckworth, she says, “always referred to herself as a sculptor.”
It’s a big piece, composed 65 tiles, each roughly two feet across, with “aspects of it that come off the wall nearly a foot.”
The artwork, created in the 1970s, is about 23 feet across and nine feet tall and weighs a staggering 2,500 pounds. It’s so big that it was essentially mortared into a wall in the lobby at 400 S. La Salle St., where it was displayed for years.
Soon, the mural will have a new home inside the University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library in Hyde Park.
Cboe Global Markets, moving its headquarters from the La Salle Street building to the renovated Old Post Office, gave the university the piece by Duckworth, who taught at the school.
Steward says the mural offers a bird’s-eye view “of the southern watershed of Lake Michigan,” with “a kind of fantasy pre-Columbian village where Chicago is.”
And the tiles “replicate a sort of topographical grid you’d see on satellite views,” which Duckworth had access to through the university’s geophysical sciences department — including images from pioneering meteorologist Tetsuya Theodore “Ted” Fujita, who studied severe weather and was nicknamed “Mr. Tornado.” The Fujita Scale, measuring the strength of tornadoes’ winds, is named for him.
In 1959, the Explorer 6 satellite “captured and transmitted the first photograph of Earth via satellite while orbiting over Mexico,” according to NASA. That helped usher a new era of excitement about outer space and imagery of and from the cosmos.
Steward says that was “a really exciting moment” that “blew a lot of people’s minds,” and Duckworth’s artwork reflects that.
Duckworth died in 2009, Fujita in 1998.
Steward says, “I wouldn’t say she modeled her work on his, but, for sure, his research and the images that he showed to her were inspirational to her. Their intellectual artistic exchange is visible in the work when you know that history.”
The mural is in storage, awaiting installation this summer at the library, an architecturally significant building designed by the late Walter Netsch, a well-known Chicago architect who once said the building wouldn’t be complete until it housed “decorative art,” Steward says.
After being removed from the La Salle Street building, the longtime home of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the mural underwent a restoration to fix some “broken bits” and clean off grime, according to Steward.
“Having been with all those traders all those years, it was totally coated in nicotine,” she says. “It’s much brighter now.”
Duckworth was hired by what was then called Dresdner Bank to complete the mural. When its Chicago offices were closed, the Cboe took possession of the artwork, and in 2021 the company moved its offices.
“Without enough uninterrupted wall space to allow Cboe to bring the massive ‘Clouds Over Lake Michigan’ ” to the company’s new space at the Old Post Office, “the artwork needed a new home,” according to the university. “Eager to do right by its creator, Cboe contacted the Duckworth Estate, who decided that due to the artist’s significant relationship with the University, UChicago should be approached first.”