CHICAGO — When Chicago was incorporated in 1837, it adopted the motto “Urbs in Horto,” meaning “City in a Garden,” and inscribed it on the official seal. The slogan is widely considered prophetic of the city’s vast swaths of public parkland, including miles of Lake Michigan shoreline and parks designed by such luminaries as Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted. The reality is rather dirtier. And flowerier, too.
The group exhibition Myth of the Organic City explores this topic at 6018North, an ambitious art space run out of a dilapidated mansion in the Edgewater neighborhood. Founded by arts administrator Tricia Van Eck in 2012, it has since been home to a rotating cast of emerging and mid-career local artists, often involved in social art practices, many working site-specifically throughout the house. Repeat visitors will note Van Eck’s penchant for keeping artworks around long after the shows they were originally part of have ended, then re-incorporating them into future ones. Sometimes 6018North seems like the host of a single endless exhibit.
The manse consists of four floors, according to which Myth of the Organic City is more or less thematically and temporally organized. The semi-finished basement covers Chicago history broadly; the first floor tackles land use from Indigenous times through settlement and heavy industry; the second floor considers the city’s waterways and land pollution; and the attic presents hopeful strategies for the future. More than 45 artists and collectives are represented, in artworks that range from traditional documentary photography to conceptual sculptures, performative wall drawings, and science-y experiments. There are lots and lots of maps, historical and contemporary. Sprawling and motley, the show feels like an embodiment of its theme: a vast urban environment, with some areas that are well-tended and fruitful, others barren and toxic, and many a complex hybrid.
Let’s start with the pretty stuff: flowers. In a delightful video, Jan Tichy animated natural elements found in the work of seven important Chicago artists, bringing to life the flat, faux-naif blooms of Roger Brown, colorful collaged florals of Henry Darger, and spooky surrealistic trees of Gertrude Abercrombie. Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero, who go by Luftwerk, dumped a gorgeous pile of sunset colors in a corner of the basement. The work, “Extraction,” is actually made up of sand and botanicals sourced from the Chicago Botanic Gardens, which is cool, but it would be cooler to know the names of those plants and the facts of their harvesting. The process of extraction isn’t usually so lovely, though; Jenny Kendler and Giovanni Aloi wrestle with this situation head-on in their memorial to the Bell Bowl Prairie, an 8,000-year-old ecosystem that was in large part destroyed in 2023 by the expansion of the Rockford airport. Using the traditional method of plaster casting, they created a death mask of the prairie, recording its now compressed soil and tire tracks. The sculpture lies on the floor of the old dining room, in front of an elegant bay of windows whose glass has been filled with translucent images of blooms.
Enter not-so-pretty industry, from the building of the Illinois and Michigan Canal to the formation of US Steel to the development of nuclear reactors, all of it tracked in historical maps as well as a very handy chalk drawing by mathematician Eugenia Cheng, the de facto house muralist. (Another Cheng schema covers the walls of an upstairs bathroom, and one was in a previous show, too.) Aleksandra Walaszek’s “And If This Is Home, Welcome Home,” a set of seven-foot-tall heavy steel vertical blinds in variegated shades of gray, hangs from a motorized rack, opening and shutting with an alarming clang every 30 seconds, like a national border, a fortified shopfront, or a metaphorical door in the face of an array of possibilities. A trio of round, hand-hammered copper light sconces by Rebecca Beachy maps the stars — and, implicitly, their astrological predictions — as they were aligned in the sky during the opening of the Union Stockyards, at the moment the Chicago River was reversed, and through light pollution this past September. A pair of eerie, edgy photo assemblages by Brian Holmes and Jeremy Bolen, framed in iridescent acid-green metal, were produced from film the artists buried in nuclear entombment sites around Chicago. The ugliness of heavy industry and its byproducts, rendered by artists, becomes stunning to the point of productive discomfort.
Or real productivity: The second-floor hallway is lined with photographs by Shane DuBay and Carl Fuldner, each contrasting a pair of taxidermized birds from the collection of the Field Museum. Comparing birds of the same species found decades apart, both inside and outside the US Manufacturing Belt, reveals how much more soot was in the atmosphere at the turn of the 20th century than later, after various public campaigns to clean up the air were put into place.
The critical usefulness of DuBay and Fuldner’s Plume series, and the cross-disciplinarity of its authors (DuBay is an evolutionary biologist, Fuldner a photo historian), is echoed in a number of solutions-oriented projects in the attic. Sangwoo Yoo transformed a discarded natural Christmas tree into an array of new materials, from incense and paper to totally unrecognizable stuff. An artist-scientist collaboration calling itself Carbon Register installed a sculptural biolab consisting of freshwater tanks filled with Cladophora, a fast-growing algae native to Lake Michigan and a primary carbon sequester in the region. Throughout the exhibition, they’ll be harvesting, drying, kiln-burning, and ultimately turning the algae into black pigment, to be used in the creation of a print edition that will double as a carbon sink. Here, too, are displayed some small photos documenting a solo endeavor by Jenny Kendler, in which she placed a dozen classical statues of the Venus de Milo in natural areas along the lakeshore. Instead of marble or plaster, these figures were portrayed in soil permeated with native plant seeds; as their idealized human forms crumbled, a perennial garden grew. Not quite “Urbs in Horto,” it is perhaps closer to “Hortus ex Urbe,” meaning a garden from the city. Given that the vast majority of the world’s lands have by now been modified by humans, it might be the best we can hope for.
Myth of the Organic City continues at 6018North (6018 North Kenmore Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) through June 1. The exhibition is part of Art Design Chicago and was curated by Tricia Van Eck.
