The 77th Annual 57th Street Art Fair

I remember the first time I saw the 57th Art Fair. It was finals week in grad school. Having just spent the night finishing a term paper. I turned it in, and walked east from campus along 57th Street, smack into this huge street festival with a crowd of thousands. It felt like a hallucination in the glittering sunlight hitting my very bleary eyes!

This weekend it’s back, one of the last vestiges of the original art colony that thrived in the neighborhood from 1894 until 1957. The colony stretched from Stony Island to Kenwood, 55th to 59th, intermingling with the professors on the west and the middle-class Black neighborhood that lasted for a time on the east along Lake Park and Harper.

The Art Colony was the product of the Columbian Exposition. First, the exposition left behind empty concession stands along 57th Street between the tracks and Stony Island that small stores and studios could afford. Iconoclast Thorstein Veblen moved into one as soon as the fair was over even though, as a professor at the brand new university, he could have afforded somewhere with running water. Second, the building boom to house visitors to the fair left behind a lot of apartments and spaces for studios for cheap. Third, the 1893 fair established the reputation of Hyde Park as a place where interesting things happened, especially cutting edge ideas and interest in the arts. For example, very early on Joseph Twyman pushed for a community of the arts at the South Park Workshop, 5835 S. Kimbark Avenue. He wanted to model William Morris’s idea that arts and crafts could mount a radical resistance to the industrial age. It offered studio space for bookbinding, weaving, metal work, pottery, and furniture making. From there it evolved into a truly bohemian enclave.

Over the decades, the area was a home to writers, eccentrics, leftists, painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers and a network of galleries and gathering spaces. Financially, the Depression and World War II took their toll, so, in 1948, Mary Louise Womer, a silversmith who owned the Little Gallery on 57th Street, had the idea of an open air art show where the visual artists could get some cash.

John Forwalter also claimed to be a founder of the art fair. He was mentioned in accounts in 1948, but he wanted top billing apparently. Most people give that to Womer. Forwalter was a student writing for the Maroon in 1948. He later became a sculptor and the art critic for the Hyde Park Herald.

The idea of a street show struck everyone who wrote about it as an exotic thing to do, a bit of Paris in Chicago. The first fair was in October 1948, when 50 artists drew about 8,000 visitors along the sidewalk of 57th Street between Kenwood and Kimbark. The artists collectively pulled in $500. The next year, the fair was in May and even bigger. The artists collectively thousands. The second fair included puppet shows, street musicians, artists in action weaving and sculpting, and an auction of artworks. One hundred artists paid a dollar each to participate. There was no jury. The goal was to give artists unmediated access to the people.

Nearly everyone I know owns something from the art fair. Some were lucky enough to buy works early on by the likes of Ruth Duckworth and Gertrude Abercrombie, whose reputations grew.

By 1952, it had so inspired the neighborhood, that the kids who lived on the 5400 block of University Avenue held their own art fair, selling their artwork for a penny apiece, along with grapeade and chocolate chip cookies. The Tribune was impressed.

In 1953, the official art fair expanded onto the Ray School playground, but in 1957, the blocks that were ground zero for the art colony were torn down. Even the Continental Gourmet Restaurant, whose first guest was Jascha Heifetz and whose great fan was Senator Paul Douglas, vanished, unable to relocate. One of the goals of urban renewal was the elimination of affordable housing so the colony dispersed, especially those who needed studio space. A few artists, like Gertrude Abercrombie, remained because they were living just outside the wrecking ball, in her case at 5728 S. Dorchester.

With the colony gone, the art fair survived because art fairs became a thing. Artists could show in Hyde Park, Old Town, Prairie Shores, and the Gold Coast. Applications came from across the country and in 1963, with too many applications for the space, the fair switched to a jury system. There were still artists scattered across the South Side who felt excluded or resented the gatekeeping as part of the gentrification sweeping the neighborhood. In 1980, they banded together to form the Community Art Fair, which meets in Bixler Park.

If you go, be sure to buy a soft drink from the Ray School stand—I’ve been told that it’s the only money they make from the extravaganza!