Historical Promenade - Ellen Lanyon - Brief Article

Art in America, March, 2001 by Claire Wolf Krantz

In her ceramic murals for the Riverwalk Gateway esplanade, Ellen Lanyon offers Chicago pedestrians a pictorial narrative of the city's history.

Chicago's latest addition to its famed lakefront and park system is a landscaped promenade bordering the Chicago River where it flows into Lake Michigan. At the east end, under Lake Shore Drive, is the new Riverwalk Gateway, a trellised, cast-concrete walkway, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which provides a pedestrian link between Grant Park, downtown Chicago and Navy Pier. Replacing a muddy, garbage-laden no-man's-land, the esplanade is part of the city's long-term effort to restore the Chicago River as a resource for recreational and commercial development.

In 1998, the painter Ellen Lanyon won a competition to create ceramic murals for the two 127-foot-long walls which flank the Riverwalk Gateway. Lanyon's mission was to provide murals that would convey a pictorial interpretation of the city's history as it is entwined with that of the Chicago River. Like most public art works, the murals are expected to enhance the space, and to be informative and accessible to the general public. Lanyon's preparatory drawings, photographs and descriptions of the murals' process and fabrication were the subject of an exhibition this past summer at the Chicago Cultural Center. Although she now lives in New York, Lanyon is a third-generation Chicagoan (two of her grandfathers were artists who worked on the Columbian Exposition of 1893); thus, she has strong personal as well as artistic connections with the city.

Associated with Chicago's Imagist painters, Lanyon produces figurative drawings, paintings, prints and artists' books with distinct surrealistic and psychological elements. Her visual sources have long included exhibits at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History as well as book illustrations relating to science, magic and wildlife. Images are made strange in her works by their changed contexts and odd juxtapositions. For the mural project, the artist derived many of the scenes from materials at the Chicago Historical Society, from her own drawings, from her photographs of Chicago taken during boat rides along the river, and from her archive of books and documentary photographs.

After extensive research into mediums and techniques that could withstand Chicago's harsh weather, Lanyon worked with a ceramic-fabrication company in Massachusetts, where she painted on 12-inch-square preglazed tiles imported from Germany. Providing her with properly prepared china paint (the colors mixed and tested under her supervision), firing facilities and technical assistance, the firm's experts helped her create a lasting, multilayered surface for her tiles. In Chicago, the units were assembled into 6-by-9-foot panels that fill the 28 spaces between existing columns on both sides of the walkway. Each panel is framed with its own dark gray border. Collectively, the borders unite this long and complicated series of pictures, enabling it to function like a foldout book that leads the viewer through its story.

Twelve introductory panels, which flank the 16 central images, present colorful geometric abstractions followed by smaller monochrome figurative vignettes referring to Chicago's Native American and botanical heritage. The 16 full-scale narrative panels each document an episode in Chicago's history. Beginning on the west side of the walkway, the first panel presents the arrival of Europeans by canoe at the portage between the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. Black-and-white text, presenting information such as event descriptions and dates, appears in the borders of each section, helping to carry the story along.

The river remains the primary theme of the narrative because of its centrality to Chicago's development. Although the waterway has become polluted, necessitating innovative engineering to clean it up, it remains a part of nature--a habitat for wildlife and a place of meditation and recreation. Bridges and maps make frequent appearances in these murals, recording the changes in the city's landscape and the evolution of bridge designs to accommodate the city's expanding needs. Several panels refer to the various inhabitants of Chicago: medicine bundles and tepees represent Native Americans; the cabin built by the first settler, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a black man of African and French descent, is associated with African-Americans; and Fort Dearborn evokes the American military. Lanyon incorporates images of plants and wildlife in each piece, recalling motifs she has used throughout her career.

The Chicago fire of 1871 appears in Lanyon's sixth panel, which details the efforts to fight the blaze, several buildings that burned and the water tower that remained. Other panels describe the two World's Fairs held in Chicago (in 1893 and 1933), and the famous Burnham Plan for the city and its parks. The last four panels include historical and contemporary views of each of the river's branches. Images of a fun house, Aladdin's Castle, and a roller coaster evoke my own recollections of childhood pleasures at Riverview, a long-gone popular amusement park along the North Branch of the river.