Art in America, On Site
March, 2001

Ellen Lanyon
Historical Promenade: the Riverwalk Gateway Murals
By Claire Wolf Krantz

Chicago's latest addition to its famed lakefront and park system is a landscaped promenade bordering the Chicago River as it flows into Lake Michigan. At the east end under Lake Shore Drive is the new Riverwalk Gateway, a trellised, cast concrete pedestrian walkway designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill connecting Grant Park with downtown Chicago and Navy Pier. Replacing a muddy, garbage-laden nomansland, the Riverfront's beautification is part of the city's long-term project of restoring the Chicago River into a natural resource for recreational and commercial development. 

In 1998, the painter Ellen Lanyon was commissioned via a competition by the city to create ceramic murals for the two 127' long walls comprising the Riverwalk Gateway. Lanyon's mission was to provide murals that would convey a pictorial interpretation of Chicago's history as it is entwined with that of the Chicago River. As with most public art works, the murals are expected to enhance the space, be informative and easily accessible to the general public, and still function as art. Her preparatory drawings, plus photographs and descriptions of the mural's process and fabrication is the subject of Lanyon's accompanying exhibition that opened in July 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 her connection with the city has strong personal as well as artistic roots. Associated with Chicago's Imagist painters, Lanyon's graphically strong figurative drawings, paintings, prints, and artists' books are both surrealistic and psychological in feeling. Her visual sources have long included exhibits at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History as well as books illustrating various objects relating to science, magic, and wildlife, each image made strange in her works by their changed contexts and juxtapositions. For the mural project, her primary sources arose from the Chicago Historical Society plus contemporary photographs of Chicago taken from boat rides along the River and her own archive of materials and drawings.

After extensive research into materials and techniques that could withstand Chicago's harsh weather, Lanyon worked with a ceramic fabricator in Massachusetts where she painted on 12" preglazed ceramic tiles imported from Germany. Providing her with properly prepared china paint (the colors mixed and tested under her supervision), firing facilities and technical assistance, their expertise ensured a lasting, multilayered surface for her tiles. In Chicago, the units were assembled into 6x9' panels that fill the 28 spaces between decorative piers on both sides of the walkway. Each panel is framed with a gray border that visually unites this long and complicated series of pictures, functioning like a foldout book leading the viewer along its visual story. Along both walls, abstract panels at each end of the passageway allude to Chicago’s geometry, its river's meandering quality, and the parks' greenery, followed by the introduction of monochromatic vignettes referring to Chicago's native origins. The 16 central panels are full-scale murals, each narrating an episode of the river's history and its effect on Chicago's foundation and growth to its present configuration and prominence.

The narrative panels begin with the European arrival by canoe to the portage between the Chicago River and Lake Michigan: the future site of a canal and the city itself. In it, Lanyon's method of conflating symbols with different bits of visual and textual information provides a broad and variegated picture of  "Chicagou." (its meaning, in Algonquin, being the wild onion pictured by Lanyon on the first panel). Subsequent panels refer to the various inhabitants of the site: Native Americans are represented by items such as medicine bundles and tepees, African Americans by the cabin built by the first settler, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, and the American military by Fort Dearborn. In each piece Lanyon incorporated images of plants and wildlife that refer back to her own career as an artist, particularly her drawings on paper.
Bridges and maps make frequent appearances in these murals, recording the changes in the city's landscape and the development of bridge designs to accommodate its expanding needs. The river remains the primary theme of the narrative because of its centrality to Chicago’s development: an important link from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and a source of water.  But the river also bisects the city and has polluted its waters, thus necessitating innovative engineering to clean it up and reverse the direction of its flow, plus bridge design to accommodate the large boats passing through.

The famous Chicago Fire of 1871 appears in Lanyon's 6th panel, along with the efforts to fight it, the buildings that burned, and the water tower that remained. Other panels describe the two World Fairs held in Chicago (in 1893 and 1933) which were the impetus for new buildings that eventuated in major museums and the heralded Burnham Plan for the city and its parks. The last four panels include historical and contemporary views from each of the River's branches and some of Chicago's other famous landmarks: Images of the funhouse, “Aladdin’s Castle,” and the roller coaster ride, "The Bobs," evoke my own recollections of childhood pleasures at "Riverview," a long-gone popular amusement park along the North Branch of the river. The final panel sums up the river's location amidst the city's geometry. Yet, it remains a part of nature -- a source for wildlife and a place of meditation and recreation.

Lanyon's successful use of certain formal devices results in a nuanced, interesting and visually satisfying mural.  The continuous gray borders of each frame contain black and white textual information to carry the narrative along. To prevent monotony, however, she periodically interrupted the borders with sections of images. Inside the frames, Lanyon juxtaposed objects and scenes of wildly diverse sizes and contexts, sometimes placing additional vignettes painted to look like old photographs or foldout postcards. Lanyon' s ability to utilize her artistic experience and ways of working enables her murals to go beyond the supposedly easily understood narrative and informational needs of public art, infusing them with a density, complexity and surrealistic indeterminacy that is art at its best.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.