57th Street Art Fair

Last updated

The 57th Street Art Fair is Chicago's oldest juried art fair. Founded in 1948, it is held the first weekend in June annually on 57th Street between Kimbark and Kenwood Avenues, in the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, directly north of the University of Chicago campus. It is "the only large, international not-for-profit art fair devoted to exhibiting original art, operated solely for the benefit of the artists, and run by a small group of volunteers without any institutional support." [1]

Contents

History

The 57th Street Art Fair was founded in 1948 by Mary Louise Womer, proprietor of The Little Gallery on 57th Street, which was then a thriving arts colony, "a time of oddballs and crazy people (in later years many of them famous as writers, scientists, and artists) and extraordinary, sometimes nutty, local events." [2] Ms. Womer wished to acquaint the large number of young artists in the neighborhood with each other, and decided to hold an outdoor fair on Saturday and Sunday, October 16 and 17, 1948. 51 artists paid 50 cents each to exhibit, and by Sunday's end, had sold $500 worth of art. [3] The fair was so popular, it was continued the next year with a committee of organizers. By 1952 there were sales of over $10,000. [4]

The early fairs were not juried, but they contained a number of exceptional artists. Claes Oldenburg's earliest recorded sales of artworks were at the 57th Street Art Fair, sometime before 1957, where he sold 5 items for a total price of $25. [5] The fair became juried in 1963, when it had grown too large for the available space.

The fair was suspended for one year in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and resumed in 2021.

Today

The 57th Street Art Fair is held on the first full weekend in June. More than 20,000 visitors see the works of some 250 artists on those two days. Continuing the spirit of the first fairs, all of the artworks are real and original, not reproductions, and the fair is free and open to the public. [6]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hyde Park, Chicago</span> Community area of Chicago

Hyde Park is the 41st of the 77 community areas of Chicago. It is located on the South Side, near the shore of Lake Michigan 7 miles (11 km) south of the Loop.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Art exhibition</span> Organized presentation and display of works of art

An art exhibition is traditionally the space in which art objects meet an audience. The exhibit is universally understood to be for some temporary period unless, as is occasionally true, it is stated to be a "permanent exhibition". In American English, they may be called "exhibit", "exposition" or "show". In UK English, they are always called "exhibitions" or "shows", and an individual item in the show is an "exhibit".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Museum of Women in the Arts</span> United States historic place

The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), located in Washington, D.C., is "the first museum in the world solely dedicated" to championing women through the arts. NMWA was incorporated in 1981 by Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. Since opening in 1987, the museum has acquired a collection of more than 6,000 works by more than 1,000 artists, ranging from the 16th century to today. The collection includes works by Mary Cassatt, Alma Woodsey Thomas, Élisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun, and Amy Sherald. NMWA also holds the only painting by Frida Kahlo in Washington, D.C., Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">White Cube</span> Contemporary art gallery

White Cube is a contemporary art gallery founded by Jay Jopling in London in 1993. The gallery has two branches in London: White Cube Mason's Yard in central London and White Cube Bermondsey in South East London; White Cube Hong Kong, in Central, Hong Kong Island; White Cube Paris, at 10 avenue Matignon in Paris; and White Cube West Palm Beach, which opened at 2512 Florida Avenue in 2020 and operates annually in West Palm Beach, Florida, from winter through to spring.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hyde Park Art Center</span>

The Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) is a visual arts organization and the oldest alternative exhibition space in the city of Chicago. Since 2006, HPAC has been located just north of Hyde Park Boulevard, at 5020 S.Cornell Avenue, in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bayou City Art Festival</span> Arts festival held in Houston, Texas

The Bayou City Art Festival is an arts festival held biannually by the Art Colony Association in Houston, Texas. The festival is held in Memorial Park in the spring and in Downtown Houston in the fall.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Arbor Art Fairs</span> Group of four award-winning, not-for-profit United States art fairs

The Ann Arbor Art Fair is a group of three award-winning, not-for-profit United States art fairs that take place annually in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Over 400,000 visitors attend the fairs each year. Prior to 2016, the fair ran Wednesday through Saturday, generally the third weekend in July. Beginning in 2016, the days shifted to Thursday through Sunday. There was no event in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic was to blame; it returned in 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">57th Street (Manhattan)</span> West-east street in Manhattan, New York

57th Street is a broad thoroughfare in the New York City borough of Manhattan, one of the major two-way, east-west streets in the borough's grid. As with Manhattan's other "crosstown" streets, it is divided into its east and west sections at Fifth Avenue. The street runs from a small park overlooking the East River in the east to the West Side Highway along the Hudson River in the west. 57th Street runs through the neighborhoods of Sutton Place, Midtown Manhattan, and Hell's Kitchen from east to west.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paris Photo</span> International art fair dedicated to photography in Paris, France

Paris Photo is an annual international art fair dedicated to photography. It was founded in 1997, and is held in November at the Grand Palais exhibition hall and museum complex, located at the Champs-Élysées in the 8th arrondissement in Paris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Contemporary art gallery</span>

A contemporary art gallery is normally a commercial art gallery operated by an art dealer which specializes in displaying for sale contemporary art, usually new works of art by living artists. This approach has been called the "Castelli Method" after Leo Castelli, whose success was attributed to his active involvement in discovering and promoting emerging artists beginning in the late 1950s with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminist art movement in the United States</span> Promoting the study, creation, understanding, and promotion of womens art, began in 1970s

The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..

Anna P. Baker was a Canadian visual artist.

Visual arts of Chicago refers to paintings, prints, illustrations, textile art, sculpture, ceramics and other visual artworks produced in Chicago or by people with a connection to Chicago. Since World War II, Chicago visual art has had a strong individualistic streak, little influenced by outside fashions. "One of the unique characteristics of Chicago," said Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts curator Bob Cozzolino, "is there's always been a very pronounced effort to not be derivative, to not follow the status quo." The Chicago art world has been described as having "a stubborn sense ... of tolerant pluralism." However, Chicago's art scene is "critically neglected." Critic Andrew Patner has said, "Chicago's commitment to figurative painting, dating back to the post-War period, has often put it at odds with New York critics and dealers." It is argued that Chicago art is rarely found in Chicago museums; some of the most remarkable Chicago artworks are found in other cities.

The Three Rivers Festival is an annual multi-day event held in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The festival lasts for nine days in mid-July, starting on the first Friday after Independence Day. Events include concerts, a community parade, amusement rides, a bed race, art and craft shows, children's and seniors mini-fests, an International Village, and a fireworks finale.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Solari</span> American painter

Mary Magdalene Solari (1849–1929) was an Italian-American artist well known for oil and watercolor paintings of figures and portraits.

The National Association of Women Artists, Inc. (NAWA) is a United States organization, founded in 1889 to gain recognition for professional women fine artists in an era when that field was strongly male-oriented. It sponsors exhibitions, awards and prizes, and organizes lectures and special events.

The Irascibles or Irascible 18 were the labels given to a group of American abstract artists who put name to an open letter, written in 1950, to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, rejecting the museum's exhibition American Painting Today - 1950 and boycotting the accompanying competition. The subsequent media coverage of the protest and a now iconic group photograph that appeared in Life magazine gave them notoriety, popularized the term Abstract Expressionist and established them as the so-called first generation of the putative movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Moore (curator)</span>

Ben Moore is a British art curator, entrepreneur and artist. He is the founder and curator of Art Below, a contemporary art organisation that places art in public spaces and has had shows in England, Germany, Japan and the United States. He is also the founder and curator of Art Wars, an exhibition of designs based on the Imperial Stormtrooper helmets from Star Wars. In 2021, Moore was part of the Art Wars NFT project which resulted in massive losses for the purchasers of the NFTs and claims of copyright theft from artists whose physical work was reproduced without their permission.

The Group was an informal but influential art association formed in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1927. Initially begun by ex-students from Canterbury College of Art, its aim was to provide a freer, more experimental alternative to the academic salon painting exhibitions of the Canterbury Society of Arts. The Group exhibited annually for 50 years, from 1927 to 1977, and it was continuously at the forefront of New Zealand art's avant-garde scene.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Woman's Building (Chicago)</span> Building at the Worlds Fair held in Chicago in 1893

The Woman's Building was designed and built for the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 under the auspices of the Board of Lady Managers. Of the twelve main buildings for the Exhibition, on June 30, 1892 The Woman's Building was the first to be completed. It had exhibition space as well as an assembly room, a library, and a Hall of Honor. The History of the World's Fair states, "It will be a long time before such an aggregation of woman's work, as may now be seen in the Woman's Building, can be gathered from all parts of the world again."

References

  1. Julie Richman and Mary Louise Womer, Chicago's 57th Street Art Fair, 57th Street Art Fair Committee Publishers, 1997,Julie Richman, "Art Fairs Today, Yesterday and Tomorrow" 'Chicago's 57th Street Art Fair, The First 50 Years 1948-1997' pp.16-22
  2. Julie Richman and Mary Louise Womer, Chicago's 57th Street Art Fair, 57th Street Art Fair Committee Publishers, 1997, p. 5
  3. Julie Richman and Mary Louise Womer, Chicago's 57th Street Art Fair, The First 50 Years 1948-1997, 57th Street Art Fair Committee Publishers, 1997, pp. 6-8
  4. Julie Richman and Mary Louise Womer, Chicago's 57th Street Art Fair, 57th Street Art Fair Committee Publishers, 1997, p. 12
  5. David McCracken, "The Art Fair That's Been In the Picture the Longest", Chicago Tribune, June 5th, 1987, page 3
  6. "Brief history of the 57th Street Art Fair". Archived from the original on 2012-06-04. Retrieved 2008-05-10.