Genealogy

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White Rabbits made the White City beautiful. When it came time to construct the sculptures and decorations that ornamented the palaces of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago’s Jackson Park, the sculptor Lorado Taft decided to turn to several of his female students at the School of the Art Institute for help at a time when bias often prevented female sculptors from finding work. When Taft, who was overseeing the fair’s sculptural ornament, asked chief architect Daniel Burnham if he could hire them, Burnham reportedly replied, “Hire anyone, even white rabbits if they’ll work!” And thus did the group of young sculptors receive its name.

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It had a short and contentious existence, but the Wall of Respect has an outsize influence and importance. In 1967, a group of African American artists formed the Organization for Black American Culture – OBAC, which sounds like the Yoruba word for chieftain. Inspired by ongoing civil rights struggles and the emergent Black Power movement, the Visual Arts Workshop of OBAC decided to collectively paint a mural celebrating African American heroes on the side of a building at 43rd Street and Langley Avenue.

When Marva Lee Pitchford-Jolly was a child growing up on her family’s farm in Crenshaw, Mississippi, she would make things out of mud under the porch, then pour water over them and watch them disintegrate. Decades later, she would make things out of clay and display them as art.

His artistic career started late and ended prematurely, but Marion Perkins left behind some extraordinary sculptures. Born in Arkansas in 1908, he was sent to Chicago to be raised by an aunt in 1916 after the death of his parents. He worked various menial jobs for the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression and eventually bought a newsstand at 37th Street and Indiana Avenue. While he sold papers, he would indulge his artistic tendencies by carving pieces of wood or stone that he had found; he was always chipping away at something, even a piece of soap.

Defying cynics, racists, and street gangs, Justine Presha’ DeVan became one of the most in-demand muralists in Chicago and the country. She shared the remarkable story behind one of her most enduring works.

The painter Archibald Motley, Jr. is famous for his paintings of his fellow African Americans in Chicago’s Bronzeville, but he himself didn’t live there. Despite – in some ways because of – his desire to address the race problem through his painting, he had a complicated relationship with his race.

Although he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and spent his life creating aesthetically pleasing things, Robert Hunter Middleton thought of himself more as a craftsman than an artist when he began his career. That career, as a typeface designer and printer, was something of a surprise.

It has become one of the most famous stories in modern photography: how Vivian Maier took hundreds of thousands of striking photos over decades of private life as a live-in nanny, all of which might have been lost to obscurity had not an enterprising real estate agent bought some of her negatives in an auction and realized the astonishing quality of her work. But perhaps there's a reason Maier never showed her work to anyone; perhaps she didn't want it to be shown.

The window displays of retail stores were once considered so important to a business that there was an entire trade journal devoted to designing them. And the flagship department store of Marshall Field’s on State Street in Chicago was the acknowledged titan of window displays, thanks largely to Arthur Valair Fraser.

“Where’s the beef?” It’s one of the most memorable lines in advertising, having become an idiom in its own right after its debut in a 1984 Wendy’s commercial that contributed to a reported 30% jump in sales that year for the fast food chain. The line was originally supposed to be the decidedly less catchy “Where’s all the beef?” but Clara Peller, the elderly star of the commercial, had emphysema and couldn’t get through the whole sentence, so it had to be shortened. If the director Joe Sedelmaier hadn’t cast an everyday person that no other ad director would have chosen, the commercial might never have taken off.

Undocumented and unemployed, Jesús Torres (1898–1949) came to the United States from Mexico in search of factory work. He became one of Chicago’s most in-demand artists.