Jin Soo Kim is thinking hard about Evanston. In her storefront studio, amid the junk that is her raw material–old railroad tracks, ten-watt lightbulbs, an abandoned bathroom sink–she’s been trying to distill the essence of her adopted hometown and put it into a form suitable to adorn the facade of a parking garage. Evanston has an ordinance that says a part of the cost of any new city building (usually about 1 percent) should be earmarked for art to decorate it. The city parking garage at Church Street Plaza, a multiuse complex under construction where Clark dead-ends at Maple, will cost $17 million; the city council approved $170,000 for its embellishment. A call went out last spring for submissions: 33 came in; five finalists were selected. Each of those five artists was given a thousand dollars to build a model of their proposed work. Kim, a sculptor who came to America from Korea in 1974 and has lived in Evanston since 1987, was among them.
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She knew what her piece shouldn’t be. No neon, she said. “That’s not Evanston.” No big apples, like the one at Old Orchard–“too commercial.” Nothing too esoteric, nothing generic. Cruising the streets near her south Evanston studio and nearby home and downtown where the project would be built, it finally came to her–those streets are the town, the tree-lined green grid that holds everything Evanstonian. She proposed a rectangular steel grid wound with copper cable and studded with street signs from every avenue and byway in the city. It would embody Evanston’s past and present and be something everyone in town could relate to. The drawing that accompanied her original proposal was nearly elegant in its simplicity–a neat, coppery box, its geometric lines countered by the organic shape of a tree growing up one side of it. The model she built was another matter. When I saw it, a few days before she was to turn it in, I wondered if it was dead in the water.
The next morning the committee announced that they’d narrowed the field to two. They’ll make a decision after getting some further questions answered, probably in the next month. Meanwhile, all five models can be seen (and commented on) at the Parks and Recreation Department office in the Evanston Civic Center, 2100 Ridge. One of the two artists still in the running is Lincoln Schatz. The other is Jin Soo Kim. –Deanna Isaacs
