This month marks the 50th anniversary of two seminal pieces of Chicago art.
Broadcaster Studs Terkel made a tape of reactions from the bewildered crowd that day, and another legendary Chicagoan, Illinois’s newly appointed poet laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks, was also there, reading the poem she’d been tasked with writing for the occasion. She’d seen only a small scale model of the sculpture before that moment, but she’d found it inscrutable, its ambiguity uncomfortable and cold. It had led her to this opening line: “Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms.”
The Wall of Respect only lasted four years: after damage from a mysterious fire, the building it covered was razed by the city. But a new book, The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago, to be published in September by Northwestern University Press, has collected the documents, reminiscences, photographs, and commentary that make its historical significance clear.
Alkalimat says the Picasso, created by a man who never set foot in the city, was “the world coming to Chicago,” while the Wall of Respect—a homegrown, working-class political statement—was “Chicago coming to the world.”
