City Escape

We just did a longish weekend to Chicago. Short and frenetic, constantly on the go. I was able to tick a few items off my summer to-do list: concert downtown in the park (Beethoven’s Fifth under the lights and waning nighttime sky), Siam Noodle and a GREAT Mexican place I ate at last time, and a visit to the Art Institute, where I saw the Georgia O'Keeffe’s show “My New Yorks.”

As opposed to how we often remember O'Keeffe as a painter of the American Southwest, these drawings and paintings represented her time off and on in New York City as well as upstate New York where she and Alfred Stieglitz summered at Lake George. Shows like this sort of gather up what ever they have and add to it from whatever collections they can borrow from and hope for a cohesive theme. I really liked the angle of this exhibition as it showed another facet of the artist that most people are not used to seeing.

O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were apartment dwellers, taking rooms in various hotels high above the sidewalks. Some of the work looked down on harbors, the East River, or between cracks in the surrounding buildings. She painted nighttime skylines from down below. The tone of the work emphasizes the art deco of that period (20s, early 30s, she eventually gave up living in New York after Stieglitz’s death in 1946). There is drama with the straight lines, the piercing light, almost hawk-like how the tall buildings stand guard, looking down with yellow eyes.

I was reminded of the contrast between my thirty-some years living in Chicago and my (by comparison) somnolent life in Okemos. My son-in-law related that while Ubering to the wedding that he my daughter were in town for he saw one dead body (laid out on the sidewalk under a sheet in front of the Westside YMCA) and a flipped car, likely stolen, left upside down. The stuff of everyday—in the city. There’s that and the excitement of being downtown under the lights, surrounded by glitzy towering edifices. The Bean, Millennium Park, the crowds, the sonic sounds of the L train racing through the tunnels under the Chicago River, cell phones jingling, the pneumatic shush of the CTA buses braking along Michigan Avenue. The city is a living breathing dynamo. So is the violence and the idea that one has no agency: You wake up to drug deals in the alley and go to sleep with gun shots, emergency vehicles screaming day and night. We are caught in a web, trapped in a cityscape. No matter how it is drawn, it overpowers the human.

People ask if I miss Chicago, the Uptown neighborhood where I spent all my Chicago years. It is a different and difficult kind of missing. I miss the people and the culture, the sense of life right outside my door, but also outside my door were needy people, random violence, bikes on sidewalks ready to run me over, cars continuing despite pedestrians crossing, the fact you cannot eat outside at a café without someone asking for money, the food on your plate. You are constantly reminded that you are part of a capitalistic system of haves and have-nots. Sometimes the bus just drives right past you.

It was a great vacation, but just that—not the life I want at this moment. And, obviously, O’Keeffe was ready for change when she permanently relocated to Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

*Side note: When visiting my sister who worked as staff at Ghost Ranch, we walked past the O’Keefe home, sort of a cottage-looking affair, the blinds were drawn and I asked her if the artist was home. My sister answered that she was very grouchy and private, maybe she was. This was perhaps 3 years before her death.