Artes in Horto – Seven Gardens for Chicago is a site and media specific work commissioned by the Terra Foundation for American Art from Jan Tichy as part of the launch of Art on theMART, a new digital art installation projecting across 2½ acres of theMART’s exterior river-facing façade.The work is presented as part of Art Design Chicago, an initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art exploring Chicago’s art and design legacy, with presenting partner, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
Chicago has been concerned with its relation to nature since its very beginning as the words Urbs in Horto (City in the Garden) engraved on the city seal suggest. The intentional implementation of green spaces within the city’s fabric has had a profound influence on Chicagoans and the artists among them, and became part of the city’s DNA through the works of Burnham, Olmsted, Jensen and Caldwell.
Artes in Horto – Seven Gardens for Chicago considers the work of seven local, historically consecutive artists referring to nature as part of their
practice: Frederick Frary Fursman, Marion Mahony Griffin, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Gertrude Abercrombie, Henry Darger, Margaret Burroughs, and Roger Brown.
A vertical digital garden honoring these artists’ legacy is projected on theMart’s façade, using this architectural landmark as a large public canvas along the Chicago River, and at the same time paying tribute to the rich history of artist-led mural projects around the city.
Natural elements harvested from the artists’ works were animated, embracing the original media and other significant aspects of each artist’s practice – Fursman’s brush strokes, Mahony Griffin’s drawing, Moholy- Nagy photograms, Abercrombie’s surrealism, Darger’s tracing and coloring, Burrough’s carving, and Brown’s painting. In that sense the dynamic projection and juxtaposition illuminate and reveal new layers within the archaeology of these works, as well as in Chicago’s art history.
This website is an endeavor to elaborate on the use of nature in the works of each of the seven artists, as well as an effort to draw lines between their depiction of nature to current nature-related topics in Chicago. In that sense, the vertical garden sprouting and growing on theMart aims to root and expand horizontally into the city’s open spaces and along its diverse conversation about green practices.
Each of the seven gardens contains a commissioned text to address the artists relationship with nature. It maps and identify some of the plant choices/interest of the artists (Artist Atlas) and links it in a rhizome manner to topics in urban nature and its manifestation in different parts of the city.
Additional links to information about the artists and their work is also listed.
Jan Tichy is a contemporary artist and educator. Working at the intersection of video, sculpture, architecture, and photography, his conceptual work is socially and politically engaged. Born in Prague in 1974, Tichy studied art in Israel before earning his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now Associate Professor at the Department of Photography and the Department of Art & Technology Studies. Tichy has had solo exhibitions at the MCA Chicago; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; CCA Tel Aviv; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Chicago Cultural Center among others. His works are included in public collections of MoMA in New York and Israel Museum in Jerusalem among others. In 2011, he created Project Cabrini Green, a community-based art project that illuminated with spoken word the last high rise building of the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago during its month-long demolition. Beyond Streaming: a sound mural for Flint at the Broad Museum in Michigan in 2017 brought teens from Flint and Lansing to share their experience of the ongoing water crisis. In 2014 Tichy started to work on a long-term, NEA supported, community project in Gary, IN – the Heat Light Water cultural platform. Over the last decade, the artist has created projections interacting with a dozen Chicago signature buildings, among them the IIT Crown Hall, Hancock Center skyscraper and Chicago Cultural Center.
Project manager: Terra Foundation: Eva Silverman
Art on theMart: Cynthia Noble
Animation: Eden Henricks
Web: Jude Agboada
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to everyone that helped me access the work of the Seven Artists in Horto – gallery director Susan Klein Bagdade from Richard Norton Gallery, art historian Lisa Wainwright from SAIC, curator Corinne Granof from the Block Museum, art historian Shiben Banerji from SAIC, Hattula Moholy-Nagy from the Moholy-Nagy Foundation, art historian Robin Schuldenfrei from the Courtauld Institute of Art, curator and director Daniel Schulman from Chicago Cultural Center, curator Douglas Stapleton from Illinois State Museum, curator Suellen Rocca from Elmhurst College Art Collection, art historian Susan Weininger from Roosevelt University, curator and director Deb Kerr from Intuit Center, Kiyoko Lerner from the Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner Foundation, director Andrea Adams from South Shore Cultural Center, gallery director Lynne Shillaci from Aaron Galleries, curator Leslie Guy from South Side Community Art Center, artist Faheem Majeed, curator Lisa Stone from Roger Brown Study Collection.
Thanks to Kioto Aoki, Katarina Marinic, Kyle Werle, Matt Gehring and the SAIC departments of Photography and Art & Technology Studies for technical support in sound recording, image editing and animation computing.
Thanks to Jennifer Siegenthaler, Eva Silverman, Michelle Puetz, Efrat Appel and Tom Dyja for support and believing.
This project has been a collaboration with the Terra Foundation of American Art, Art on theMart, Obscura Digital and the City of Chicago
