A Picasso For All
Public art fascinates me.
After all, what is a sculpture doing? Around important public amenities — like buses and buildings and traffic lights — what business does it have?
Picasso for all
In the heart of downtown Chicago, it sits between skyscrapers.
What fascinates me about public art is how we use it. In a million lives, it plays a million roles. Sometimes the sideshow, sometimes the main feature, and sometimes it goes completely unnoticed. What does it mean to the people who walk past it everyday? Does it mean something else to tourists, running into it by accident on vacation?
This vast art installation, called The Untitled Picasso, lies in the heart of downtown Chicago. It is in a plaza surrounded by skyscrapers. In front of it run trains and buses, Ubers and private vehicles.
It was a busy week day like that when I sat on a bench to draw it. I chose the bench because a shadow fell upon it from a nearby skyscraper.
Then, for a few minutes, I just watched. I watched a man with a trolley suitcase pause to take a photo of the sculpture. He sat at the corner of the pedestal, presumably to wait for someone. There are always tourists in Chicago. Close to lunch time, a few people came out of nearby offices to sit at the foot of the sculpture. They talked as they ate. They did not look up at the sculpture and did not need to. To them, it had always existed right there. I watched some children slide down its metallic slope. From a distance, I could hear them laugh in glee. Their parent stood nearby, watching with arms folded. From time to time, she glanced up at Untitled Picasso. I wonder what she thought of it.
They were moving inside their own little universe, just like I was inside mine. I put them down on paper as fast as I could. I wondered about their day. I wondered about the things they saw, and if they were different from what I saw. They were strangers to each other. But on my page they were together. They were the “people who sat under the Picasso that day, at that time”.
As time passed, they began to get up and leave. At once, the group was shattered. Only an impression had survived, and that was on my page. They are still there, the “people who sat under the Picasso that day at that time”.
Maybe that is the point of public art. It is the only point that occurs to me.