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PUBLIC ART CHRONICLES: LOUISE HELPING HANDS BOURGEOIS’ AND CHICAGO’S IDENTITY ISSUES

Erika Doss

In June 2011, Louise Bourgeois’ Helping Hands,asetoflife-sizehandscarved out of black granite columns, was relocated to Chicago Women’s Park, a tastefully landscaped garden spot in the city’s Prairie Avenue Historic District (Figure 1). Originally installed at a windswept site overlooking Lake Michigan, Helping Hands is dedicated to Jane Addams (1860–1935), the Nobel Prize winning activist who promoted suffrage, social responsibility, pacifism, and public service, and founded Chicago’s Hull House, the first settlement house in the United States, on the city’s Near West Side. Despite public art’s strong presence in Chicago, Helping Hands is the city’s only permanent public sculpture commemorating a woman, and one of relatively few sculptures by women in the city. The story of its removal and eventual relocation suggests that honoring Addams and what she represents simply doesn’t mesh with Chicago’s sense of itself today. Helping Hands originated in 1989, when an ad hoc citizens group called the Jane Addams Memorial Committee came together on Hull House’s 100th anniversary and pressed for a permanent public memorial. Joining forces with the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the group approached the B.F. Ferguson Monument Fund, established in 1905 by Chicago lumber baron Benjamin Franklin Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 09:39 12 June 2012 Ferguson and administered by the Art Institute of Chicago for the “erection and maintenance of enduring statuary and monuments, in the whole or in part of stone, granite, or bronze, in the parks, along the boulevards, or in other public places within the City of Chicago, Illinois, commemorating worthy men or women of 1 America or important events in American history.” Ferguson Fund trustees agreed to finance a Jane Addams memorial for $250,000, picked a downtown lakefront location, and hired public art expert Mary Jane Jacob as the commissioningcuratorchargedwithselectingthe artist. Jacob was then orchestrating the landmark public art exhibition “Culture in Action” (1992–1993), which included Suzanne Lacy’s Full Circle, atemporary installation of 100 limestone boulders scattered on sidewalks throughout

Public Art Dialogue q ISSN 2150-2552 print/ISSN 2150-2560 online 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21502552.2012.653237 http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals Figure 1. Louise Bourgeois. Helping Hands, Chicago, Illinois. 1996. Overview of sculpture as re-sited in Chicago Women’s Park. Photograph: Erika Doss, August 2011.

Chicago’s downtown Loop, each displaying the name of (and a quote by) a prominent Chicago woman – from Jane Addams to WLS-TV news anchor Linda 2 Yu – on a bronze plaque. After speaking with various artists including Maya Lin about the project, Jacob selected Bourgeois to memorialize Addams. Although Bourgeois (born in France in 1911) had been working for decades producing sculptures, paintings, and prints focusing especially on psychologically charged Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 09:39 12 June 2012 studies of the body, she especially gained art world fame following a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1982, and was chosen to represent the United States at the 1993 Venice Biennale. By selecting her to pay tribute to Addams, Chicago acquired the work of a well-respected woman artist. In 1996, Helping Hands was dedicated in Jane Addams Memorial Park, a three-acre site east of Navy Pier designed by Miriam Gusevich, a landscape architect employed by the Chicago Park District (Figure 2). The site and the sculpture were treated independently; while Gusevich visited Bourgeois in her Brooklyn studio and shared her concept of the park as “a quiet contemplative oasis in the midst of the city,” the artist herself never visited the site and “only had a 3 general idea of the park’s scale.” Helping Hands was, in fact, Bourgeois’ first public art commission. Similar public commissions quickly followed: her series 95 Figure 2. Louise Bourgeois. Helping Hands, Chicago, Illinois. 1996. View of sculpture as originally sited in Jane Addams Memorial Park, near Ohio Street Beach and east Navy Pier. Photograph: Kate Zeller, 1996.

Welcoming Hands (1996), which features six sculptures of bronze hands set on marble bases, is located in an outdoor terrace above the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, and her permanent installation Hold Me Close, which also features sets of hands, was dedicated at the Tsunami Memorial Park in Krabi, Thailand, in 2005. But Bourgeois was always more of a studio and gallery artist who worked Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 09:39 12 June 2012 intuitively and focused on her own, often deeply personal, concerns and issues. Helping Hands, was not, in fact, designed as a memorial to “Jane Addams” per se. Rather, Bourgeois’ sculpture references the reformer’s ethos: her commitment to democratic social progress, her humanitarian compassion, her insistence that both private and public concerns are responsible for social well- being. Bourgeois was inspired by Addams’ memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), in which she recalled witnessing the working poor bargain for food in London’s East End in 1883:

The final impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and sallow faces, but of myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless ... and workworn . Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as 96 the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward. I have never since been able to see a number of hands held upward, even when they are moving rhythmically in a callisthenic exercise, or when they belong to a class of chubby children who wave them in eager response to a 4 teacher’s query, without a certain revival of this memory. Modeled on the hands of “a dozen different people!” Bourgeois described her six-part sculpture as a “waltz of hands” that “express a plea for friendship, of 5 kindness, compassion, tolerance because Jane Addams had this as an ideal.” Aiming to contextualize Helping Hands, Jacob commissioned the Chicago design firm Studio Blue to develop four didactic signage panels for the sculpture, resembling open books mounted on posts and featuring images and texts headlined “advocate,” “visionary,” “pacifist,” and “Hull House founder.” The texts, written by Jacob, explained who Addams was and why she was so important: her dedicated championship for the rights of the urban working poor, for improved housing and sanitation conditions, for civil rights, for world peace (Figure 3). Emphasizing Addams’ social reform impact in Chicago and around the world, the “visionary” panel explained: “This first monument in Chicago to a woman is dedicated to ... Jane Addams and the many she served . SYMBOLS It depicts different ages of Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 09:39 12 June 2012

Figure 3. Studio Blue. Original didactic signage panel for Helping Hands, Chicago, Illinois. 1996. Sand-cast bronze and steel. Jane Addams Memorial Park, near Ohio Street Beach and east Navy Pier. Photograph: Kate Zeller, 1996.

97 humankind – gentle baby, vulnerable child, able adult, aging parent. HANDS ... Comforting, helping, strong in solidarity .” Helping Hands was not, however, a public art success in Chicago. Nestled in a sunken vale planted with prairie grasses, surrounded by a low wrought-iron fence, and circled by a heavily trafficked lakefront bike path, the sculpture was both hidden and perceptible in its original location: when the grasses grew tall, the four-foot sculptures all but disappeared; when they were cut back, the columns stood awkwardly like black nubs in the bottom of a shallow bowl. Although thousands of people walked or cycled past Helping Hands every day, it was not especially well received: as Michael Lash, director of public art for the City of Chicago commented in 1997: “It just doesn’t work very well. You have to search for the sculpture, even though ... the sidewalks lead to it . It’s beautifully carved, but you can’t see that.” One local newspaper columnist questioned why Addams was not remembered with a big bronze statue like the “new realistic and heroic Michael Jordan sculpture outside the 6 United Center.” Others wondered why the sculpture was installed on the downtown lakefront, nowhere near the more industrial and inner-city neighborhoods where Addams forged her powerful reform movement. Less than a year after the sculpture’s dedication, city officials began discussing redesign and/or removal options. Similar controversy erupted over a different Bourgeois piece in New York that year. In August 1997, Bourgeois’ six-piece public sculpture Welcoming Hands (1996), which had been commissioned by combined interests at the Public Art Fund, Battery Park City Authority, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, was abruptly removed from its location along New York Harbor and relocated to a more secluded spot about 100 feet inland, surrounded by large beds of leafy plants. The sculpture, a version of which was later installed in Paris, was deemed potentially “offensive” to museum visitors who might associate Bourgeois’ carved limbs with “severed body parts from the death camps.” Never told why Welcoming Hands was moved, the artist was understandably upset, explaining that she had hoped audiences would quite literally hold the sculpted hands “the way Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 09:39 12 June 2012 a grown-up will hold the hand of a child with a feeling of protection and affection.” Further, its original waterfront location across from the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island was a deliberate reference to the American promise of immigration, and her own experience as a first-generation citizen, an´ emigre´ from France. Officials from Battery Park City Authority, on the other hand, remarked: “Nobody wants to offend ... Louise Bourgeois . But the whole issue with public art is that while nobody wants 7 to be a philistine, the sole criteria cannot be what the artist wants.” Bourgeois seems to have invested considerable thought regarding the intended spatial setting and audience response for Welcoming Hands in New York – although ultimately what she regarded as an inviting immigration narrative clashed with what museum administrators imagined as a horrific reminder of the Holocaust. But her sculpture for Chicago was more perfunctory, perhaps because she never visited the 98 site or engaged with any of the various publics who had originally advocated on behalf of a memorial to Jane Addams. Installed in a sunken and unsheltered spot, often obscured by the prairie grasses planted to highlight Addams’ Midwestern origins, Helping Hands found few public art enthusiasts in Chicago. Jacob described Helping Hands as a “monumental anti-monument” with a “significant feminist and enlightened point of view” oriented toward civic action rather than self-importance, and as such significantly different than the bronze hero-on-a-horse memorials erected elsewhere in Chicago. Bourgeois agreed, explaining: “Instead of trying to rival with the height of the building [of downtown Chicago] I have made a sculpture which is so discrete and so sensitive that my sculpture doesn’t have a bone of contention with the building.” But, she confided, “What I’m concerned with this here is vandalism. You see how fragile it is. So it is a 8 leap of faith to put this in an open space but I take a chance.” Unfortunately, in 2002, two of the stone hands were vandalized, probably smashed by a “small rock or the equivalent” says sculpture conservator Andrzej Dajnowki, who worked with the Park District in the 1990s. “It didn’t take much to damage them,” he adds. “She worked with good quality granite that was very fragile, 9 very delicate in terms of how she carved it.” In 2004, Helping Hands was removed from the site. Bourgeois soon replaced the damaged columns by carving two completely new pieces, each distinguished from the four originals by being marked “LB” at the base instead of “LB 93.” But from 2005 to 2011, Helping Hands sat in a Chicago warehouse while city officials wrangled about where it should be reinstalled. If most agreed that the sculpture should not be returned to the lakefront, enthusiastic community interest in moving it to the courtyard of the Hull House Museum was undercut by the Park District – which did not want to lose control of Chicago’s single memorial to a woman. Finally, Helping Hands was relocated to Chicago Women’s Park, a small garden on the city’s Near South Side that “honors the 10 contributions that women have made to the city throughout its history.” Today,

Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 09:39 12 June 2012 Helping Hands is nestled next to the Clarke House Museum, an 1836 Greek Revival style residence (Chicago’s oldest such house) that “shows what life was like for a middle-class family in Chicago during the city’s formative years before the Civil 11 War.” No longer nestled in a sunken vale, the sculpture is on solid ground in this new location but, again, out of place: now more of an artsy lawn ornament in a cloistered museum community than a public memorial physically situated within or topically resonant with Jane Addams’ social reform “contributions” to Chicago’s working poor. Only one of the sculpture’s original bronze signs has been retained in the new location, the “visionary” panel. At dedication ceremonies in September 2011, a granite marker was added to the installation, which reads: “Helping Hands, Memorial to Jane Addams by Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010).” Such words and dates suggest that the artist now trumps the subject of this particular public memorial. 99 Chicago is well known for public sculpture by famous artists, from Lorado Taft’s grand fountains to modern and contemporary pieces by Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Richard Hunt, Claes Oldenburg, Anish Kapoor, and Jaume Plensa. Size matters: Oldenburg’s 100-foot Bat Column (1977), Kapoor’s 33-foot Cloud Gate (2004), and Seward Johnson’s Forever Marilyn (2011), a 26-foot bronze statue of Marilyn Monroe trying to keep her dress from flying up (a temporary installation based on Monroe’s subway stance in the 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch), are among the city’s most recent oversized sculptures. So does private funding: the family of Chicago financier Lester Crown paid 10 million dollars toward Plensa’s 17 million dollar Crown Fountain (2004) in Millennium Park, and an untold number of corporate patrons funded Kapoor’s 23 million dollar Cloud Gate. Entertainment is key: the spatially interruptive and physically interactive qualities of Cloud Gate, Crown Fountain, and Forever Marilyn attract big crowds of posing and picture-taking viewers. Today in Carl Sandburg’s “city of the big shoulders,” audiences seem especially drawn to big sculptures financed by big money. Smaller pieces with potentially provocative social messages and historically informed memories, pieces like Helping Hands, are neither particularly noticeable – especially when tucked in windswept locales or relocated to landscaped historic districts – nor, as a result, especially popular public artworks. In the early 1990s, Bourgeois developed a series of studio sculptures featuring fragmented marble limbs and hands for freestanding installations such as Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands), projects that paired organic and institutional materials (body parts versus fences, tables, and tools) to explore issues of liberation and constraint, unity, and isolation. She continued to explore such relationships in Helping Hands, which recalls both the human scale of the social network that Addams created, and how reform institutions like Hull House invoked national redemption through shared civic responsibility. While the hands in Helping Hands are vulnerable they emerge from bulky granite blocks, with the Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 09:39 12 June 2012 largest grouping of four clasped hands alluding to the strength of solidarity (Figure 4). As Shannon Jackson observes, “the sculpture argues for a historical link between itself and Chicago’s departments of social services – its soup kitchens, school lunch programs, and public housing. The hands represent aesthetically the operations of giving and taking that justify public and private welfare – and that 12 ensure its continual contestation.” In contemporary Chicago, however, those operations are under attack and being dissolved. Despite the recent glut of corporate scandals in America, Helping Hands challenges a “greed is good” ethos that remains in place and has largely supplanted Jane Addams’ vision of a just and democratic social order. The 23 million corporate dollars spent on Cloud Gate, for example, far exceeds Chicago’s annual budget for women’s and children’s health care. And while Helping Hands 100 Figure 4. Louise Bourgeois. Helping Hands, Chicago, Illinois. 1996. Detail of clasped hands, Chicago Women’s Park. Photograph: Erika Doss, August 2011.

has been removed to a quieter and presumably safer spot, it still remains vulnerable to today’s money-obsessed mindset: when I saw the sculpture in August 2011, someone had scratched a big dollar-sign onto the single bronze signage panel that now accompanies Bourgeois’ sculpture, the one reading “visionary.” While this might have been the work of an Occupy Wall Street activist wondering why

Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 09:39 12 June 2012 and how a memorial to Jane Addams wound up in such a bourgeois garden spot on Chicago’s South Loop, it might also have been the response of an incensed Tea Party member wondering how and why memorials to radical social reformers get installed anywhere in America’s public sphere. Ultimately, while Helping Hands is an impressively carved sculpture it fails to enlighten those publics who want to know about Jane Addams, the ostensible purpose behind its commission.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank Julia Bachrach, Andrzej Dajnowski, Miriam Gusevich, Mary Jane Jacob, Jeff Huebner, Eli Robb, and Ellen Skerrett for their help and advice with this essay. 101 NOTES

1 Allen Weller, “Lorado Taft, the Ferguson Fund, and the Advent of Modernism,” in The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 41. 2 Mary Jane Jacob, “Eight Projects: Full Circle,” in Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago Curated by Mary Jane Jacob (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 64–74. 3 Miriam Gusevich, “Woman, Allegory, Fragment: The New Jane Addams Memorial in Chicago,” unpublished paper delivered at the University of Chicago (1999), n.p., and telephone interview with author, Sep. 1, 2011. 4 Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 67–8. Mary Jane Jacob shared this quote with Bourgeois and encouraged her to pursue “the subject of hands” in the project, as noted in an email from Jacob to the author, Sep. 5, 2011. 5 Louise Bourgeois quoted in Adrienne Drell, “Finally, A Fit Tribute to Addams; Sculpture to Set Mood for New Park,” Chicago Sun-Times, Mar. 24, 1995, 7. 6 Louise Kiernan, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” Chicago Tribune, Sep. 28, 1997, 2; Barbara Brotman, “Must Memorials to Heroic Females Hit Rock Bottom?,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 20, 1994, 8. 7 Amei Wallach, “Sculptures Moved and Debated: To an Artist, A Tender Image; To Others, a Grim Reminder,” New York Times, Aug. 25, 1997, C-9, C-12. 8 Mary Jane Jacob quoted in Jeff Huebner, “Hearts of Stone,” Chicago Reader, Jul. 10, 1997, at: http://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/hearts-of-stone/Content?oid ¼ 893851 (accessed Aug. 11, 2011); Louise Bourgeois quoted on “A Touch of Jane Addams by Louise Bourgeois,” Art:21 (PBS, 2001). 9 Andrzej Dajnowski in telephone interview with author, Aug. 15, 2011. 10 “Chicago Women’s Park and Gardens,” at: http://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/index.cfm/ fuseaction/parks.detail/object_id/f81da97f-89ac-4450-85a3-259cf5dedc9d.cfm (accessed Nov. 15, 2011). 11 “Clarke House Museum,” at: http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/things_see_do/attractions/ dca_tourism/Clarke_House_Museum.html (accessed Nov. 15, 2011). 12 Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 144.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Erika Doss is professor and chair in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches courses in American, modern, and contemporary art and cultural studies. Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 09:39 12 June 2012 Her wide-ranging interests in American art are reflected in the breadth of her publications, which range from Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities (1995) to Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010). Recent monographs include The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials (2008). Doss is also co-editor of the “Culture America” series at the University Press of Kansas, and is on the editorial boards of Memory Studies, Public Art Dialogue, and Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief.

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