In 1954, sculptor Milton Horn created Chicago Rising From the Lake, a three-ton bronze relief that trumpeted the city’s role as the breadbasket and transportation hub of the nation–and the world. For more than a quarter century, the sculpture graced the front of a now-demolished city parking garage on West Wacker. But until its reinstallation at the Columbus Drive Bridge last spring, the work was considered missing–it had languished for 14 years in a southwest-side junkyard.
“My interest in representing artists goes back 35 years, and in a wonderful career I have been fortunate enough to represent some world-class ones,” says Hodes, citing as clients painters James Rosenquist and Victor Vasarely and sculptors Richard Hunt and Armand Arman. “Luckily enough, I’ve been pretty successful as a lawyer, so I’ve been able to devote time and resources to helping them.” He has authored books on legal matters relating to art and artists, helped found the nonprofit Lawyers for the Creative Arts, and is a major supporter of the Chicago Artists’ Coalition.
Over the past 20 years the program has been allocated about $8 million (mostly through municipal bonds), or an annual average of $400,000. Lash points out that when the Percent-for-Art Ordinance was amended in 1987, upping the figure from 1 to 1.33 percent, “it helped the program to cover administration costs.” Still, he says, that left little for cataloging and conservation.
Lash complains that the recent stories of misplaced and lost art have unfairly assigned blame to the program. Nevertheless, he admits, these “false controversies have shown a real need for the ordinance changes we wanted to enact. As it was already written, we knew it was a problem. But for somebody else to say, ‘This is a problem,’ then what we wanted to change in the ordinance all along is being changed, and that’s a good thing.”
Hodes’s father, Barnet, was an alderman and the city’s corporation counsel under Mayor Edward J. Kelley. He ran Richard J. Daley’s first mayoral campaign. In the 1930s, Barnet Hodes headed the group of civic leaders that raised funds to erect the Heald Square Monument at Wacker and Wabash. Begun by Lorado Taft (who died while the work was in progress) and completed by Leonard Crunelle, the statue memorializes Haym Salomon, Robert Morris, and George Washington–the principal financiers of the Revolutionary War flanking the military commander (“a Jew, a Catholic, and a Protestant,” says Hodes). The work was dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941.
But whether Hodes would ultimately prevail in his fight with City Hall was another story. The amended ordinance was initially drafted last November. When Lash handed me a copy two months later, it was still being scrutinized by city lawyers, aldermen, and the Department of Cultural Affairs. Hodes was scrutinizing it too, and he was making his own recommendations. The new ordinance would be the subject of a City Council hearing before going to the full council in March. Hodes would play a prominent role in the debate, and the ordinance would undergo additional changes. But as a lawyer Hodes had to realize you win some and you lose some.
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Every city tends to brag about its cultural sophistication. But when it comes to public art in Chicago, for once the rhetoric is justified. In recent years, civic boosters have taken to calling the city a “Museum Without Walls” because of its wide array of outdoor sculptures and other public works by international and local artists. From the monumental statuary of Lorado Taft–the first Chicago sculptor to achieve widespread success–to art deco building ornamentation to WPA murals to postwar modernist sculptures to community murals, Chicago boasts one of the nation’s finest and most varied collections of public art.
