CASE STUDY J. Morgan Puett prepares for “Department (Store).”
Nick Cave, Soundsuit, 2005.
Arranged in precise rows, more than 100 glass display cases in the Carson Pirie Scott building aren’t left over from the department store, which closed in February 2007. Instead, they’ve been installed by artist J. Morgan Puett, whose exhibition “Department (Store)” kicks off the first season of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new, 32,000-square-foot Sullivan Galleries (33 S State St), which occupy the seventh floor of Louis Sullivan’s landmark building.
Puett’s display cases start out empty; over the course of the fall semester, hundreds of SAIC faculty, students and other collaborators will fill them with artwork and objects. At the same time, the artist will rearrange the cases every three days based on the phases of the moon, the weather and systems she’s devised in response to Sullivan’s architecture. The Sullivan Galleries’ concurrent show, “Ah…Decadence!” (curated by SAIC interim dean of faculty Lisa Wainwright), features 42 outside artists—and SAIC faculty members such as Nick Cave and Michiko Itatani—who address turn-of-the-20th-century notions of ornament and excess in painting, sculpture and other media.
Mary Jane Jacob, the SAIC’s new executive director of exhibitions, says the two shows reflect the Sullivan Galleries’ mission as an educational institution committed to public outreach. Replacing the SAIC’s Gallery 2 and Project Space in Greektown, the galleries will host the student-thesis shows and student-curated shows that were held in that space. But the new galleries also will stage themed group exhibitions and solo shows of professional artists such as Omer Fast, who won a major award at the 2008 Whitney Biennial and will present a new video at the Sullivan Galleries in October.
Even these higher-profile exhibitions allow for student involvement: Students helped Puett and Sanford Biggers (the artist who created the exhibition design for “Ah…Decadence!”) install the current shows, and the SAIC is offering several courses, appropriately enough, on decadence. Jacob says the young artists benefited from seeing the two pros, who both happen to be SAIC grads, at work.
Before becoming an independent curator in 1990, Jacob served as chief curator of the museums of contemporary art in Chicago and Los Angeles; in 2000, she began teaching and organizing exhibitions at the SAIC. When SAIC academic departments such as architecture and fashion moved into other parts of the former Carson Pirie Scott building (now called the Sullivan Center) in 2007, Jacob lobbied for a new gallery space there, reasoning that the Loop location would be more accessible to SAIC students and would provide more uninterrupted space than Gallery 2. (Once the Sullivan Galleries were approved, Jacob notes, it took only six months to install them.) Jacob has hired a curatorial assistant, Kate Zeller, and plans to publish scholarly books that relate to SAIC exhibitions as well as smaller catalogues.
She believes “Ah…Decadence!” and “Department (Store)” will demonstrate—to jaded Chicagoans and fresh-faced first-year students alike—that the SAIC promotes all kinds of media and subject matter. And she’s confident the Sullivan Galleries “will bring [shows] to another level, which is quite fitting for where we are as an institution.”
The SAIC hosts receptions for “Ah…Decadence!” and “Department (Store)” on Friday 5.