Sculptor Dennis Adams’s Bad Idea
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Adams noticed that the shopkeepers took chairs outside to enjoy the warm weather, but they always sat with their backs to the park. He came up with the idea of reproducing the different signs along Madison and building tables and benches out of these reproductions. He says the signs, many of them handpainted, included a variety of images, ranging from portraits of Malcolm X to pictures of items for sale in the stores. Adams wanted community leaders to use the tables to distribute pamphlets about neighborhood events to passersby. He even hired a local sign painter to work on the project, but that’s as far as it got. The proposed piece, titled Resale (Border Spill), was ultimately rejected by the committee of community members he’d worked with for several months. “They couldn’t get beyond the images that I was proposing to paint on the tables,” Adams says, “many of which I thought were quite beautiful.”
Garfield Park, the site for Adams’s proposal, is in the midst of a predominantly African-American community on the city’s west side. The strip along Madison that Adams wanted to document had been named a redevelopment area by the city (a designation that used to be more bluntly called “slum and blighted”), and many of the buildings that he photographed a year ago have since been demolished.
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