Chapman Kelley (Born 1932)

CHAPMAN KELLEY
American, b. 1932
(Texas)

Born:
San Antonio, Texas

Education:
    •    Attended Hugo D. Pohl Acadamy of Art School, San Antonio
    •    Attended Trinity University
    •    Attended Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
    •    1954 & 1955 Awarded the William Emlen Cresson European Traveling Scholarship
    •    1954 Received Honorable Mention in the Thomas Eakins Figure Painting Competition
    •    1955 Won the Celia Beaux Portrait Painting Award.

Honors:
    •    1998 -Mayor’s Award for Naturalized Landscape, Department of Environment, City of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
    •    1985 -Illinois Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects Endorsement Presented to Park District Edmund Kelly
    •    1985 -State of Illinois Eighty-Fourth General Assembly of the Senate; Senate Resolution No. 420 Offered by Senator John A. D’Arco
    •    1985 -City Brightener, Bright New City Inc., Chicago, Illinois
    •    1991 -Volunteer of the Year Chicago Area Projects, Chicago, Illinois
 
Awards:
    •    1969 -$2500 Purchase prize, Sun Carnival National Exhibition, El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas
    •    1965/66 -Second Biennial Citation for outstanding contribution to the Arts, Who’s Who in the South and Southwest
    •    1965 -7th Annual Eight State Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, Top Purchase Award for permanent collection of the Oklahoma Art Center
    •    1965 -Julian Onderdonk Memorial Purchase Prize in Texas Annual for the permanent collection of the Witte Museum, San Antonio
    •    1963 -First Purchase Prize, 6th Annual Invitational Painting Exhibition, Longview, Texas, view it here.
    •    1964 -E.M. Brodnax Memorial Award, 35th Annual Dallas County Painting, Drawing and Sculpture Exhibit, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, Texas
    •    1963 -S.J. Wallace Truman Prize ($500.), National Academy of Design Annual Exhibition of American Art, New York
    •    1963 -Childe Hassam Purchase ($1200.), American Academy of Arts and Letters
    •    1961/62 -Award Winner, Annual Invitational Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, Longview Art League, Longview, Texas
    •    1960 -First Prize ($1000.), State Fair of Texas Award, 22nd Annual Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibit, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts
    •    1958/60/61Award Winner, Annual Dallas County Exhibition, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts

Chapman Kelley’s first New York exhibition was resoundingly received in 1963 (sold out and featured with color illustration in Life Magazine, Sept. 20, 1963). Since the middle fifties, Kelley has participated in many of this country’s major national group exhibitions including:
    •    Pennsylvania Academy Annual, Philadelphia.
    •    Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C.
    •    Audubon Artist’s Annual, New York.
    •    Mid-Year Show, Butler Art Institute, Youngstown Ohio.
    •    Young American Realists, Cummer Gallery of Art, Jacksonville, Florida;
    •    20th Century Realists Exhibition, San Diego Museum;
    •    Pennsylvania Academy Exhibit of Former Students, Philadelphia;
    •    Midwest Biennial, Josyln Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska.

Chapman Kelley attended the San Antonio Academy of Art, where artist Hugo Pohl was president and director, for eight years. Upon completion, he entered Trinity University where he studied for 2 ½ years, then the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for 4 years. While at the Pennsylvania Academy, Kelley was awarded the William Emlen Cresson European Traveling Scholarship in 1954 and 1955. Kelly also received honorable mention in the Thomas Eakins Figure Painting Competition in 1954 and won the Celia Beaux Portrait painting award in 1955.

In 1963, Chapman Kelley sold out his first show with Janet Nessler Gallery in New York. This accomplishment was featured in the September 20th issue of Life Magazine. The article, titled “Sold Out Art”, featured a detail image of one of Kelley’s paintings, The Yellow Chrysanthemum, 1962. Chapman Kelley’s paintings, Pier, 1962 and Lights by the Lake, 1962, were included in his First New York Exhibition at Janet Nessler Gallery.  

Throughout the next decade Kelly would expand his artistic style from the impressionistic approach that garnered him early accolades to a more minimalist abstraction style encompassing floral and seasonal imagery. From 1956 to 2010, Kelley compiled an extensive list of over 70 shows and exhibitions throughout the United States. These include the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Dallas Museum of Art (7 group exhibitions), Dallas, TX; National Academy of Design, New York; as well as museums in Oklahoma, Louisiana, California, Illinois, Tennessee and other states.

Kelley’s works can be found in numerous museums and collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Former President Lyndon B. Johnson; El Paso Museum of Art, Texas Instruments Inc., Mrs. Eugene McDermott of Dallas, Apparel Mart of Dallas, El Centro and Mountain  View Junior Colleges, First National Bank of Dallas, Oklahoma Art Center.

When the Chicago Park District announced last month that it had hired a New York landscape architect to redesign the northeast corner of Grant Park on a $45 million budget, including the controversial site of the new Chicago Children's Museum, there was no mention of an ongoing legal battle over what it's already done in that area. But there's a decision pending in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals that's expected to have repercussions for artists and public art all over the country. The case addresses the question of whether artists have the legal right to protect their work from mutilation or destruction.

The plaintiff is artist Chapman Kelley, whose Wildflower Works, a 1.5-acre garden in the part of Grant Park known as Daley Bicentennial Plaza, was deliberately hacked up by the Park District five years ago. In a mixed decision last year, a U.S. District Court ruled against Kelley's claim that Park District officials violated his rights as an artist when they shrank and changed his work so drastically as to make it unrecognizable. Kelley's lawyer for the appeal, Kirkland & Ellis partner Alex Karan, noted on his personal blog that he took this case pro bono for reasons beyond his friendship with Kelley—he's troubled that the district court ruling not only denies legal protection to "any site-specific public art" but "throws into question any artist's rights."

According to the brief Karan's team filed, the lower court ruling is so flawed that even work by Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo would fail to qualify for protection. "If this ends up being the end of my legal career," Karan blogged as he was working on the opening brief last spring, "it will be on a high note."

Kelley, a painter who'd done large wildflower installations in Dallas, had the enthusiastic support of the Park District when he planted his garden, at his own expense, back in 1984, and it was greeted with awards and a heap of glowing publicity. A living version of a Kelley painting, it consisted of two ovals (the elliptical shape is a Kelley trademark), each the size of a football field, framed by gravel paths and densely planted with 60 varieties of native flowers blooming white at the outer edges and more intensely pigmented toward the center.

Planned to flower "sequentially" from spring to fall and, once fully established, to be self-sustaining, it was green ahead of its time—designed to thrive without watering, fertilizer, or insecticides. It was maintained by Kelley and a little army of volunteers, and he says he never heard anything about it but compliments except during a glitch in 1987, when it was accidentally overwatered and there were complaints about it looking ragged. He's convinced that in 2004, when it had gone "15 years without a drop of artificial water," it made Millennium Park's fledgling Lurie Garden with its embedded sprinklers and fenced trees look so bad by comparison that the Park District decided on sabotage.

As he was preparing to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Wildflower Works, Kelley says, he was called to a meeting with Park District staff members who jolted him by announcing that the garden was about to get a makeover. He protested, but within a week the surgery was under way. More than half of the 68,000-square-foot garden was removed, and the shape of what remained was radically changed. The twin ovals were cut down to rectangles, fenced in by incongruous hedges, and surrounded by high-maintenance lawn and masses of rose bushes.

Kelley told me it cost the Park District more than $700,000 to install this meaningless hodgepodge, which subsequently required twice-weekly watering. He argues that he should have at least been given a chance to move the artwork that he considered the culmination of his long career. His lawsuit charges the Park District with breach of contract and violation of his rights under the 1990 federal Visual Artists Rights Act. (The Park District did not return calls for comment.)

Under VARA, artists have the right to protect their work from modification or destruction no matter who owns it, and must be given 90 days to remove any piece that's threatened. But VARA defines an artwork as a painting, drawing, print, sculpture, or photograph original enough to qualify for copyright. When Kelley first filed his suit, there was speculation about whether the court would accept a garden as an artwork.

As things turned out, that was no problem: District Court judge David H. Coar found that Wildflower Works qualified as either a painting or a sculpture. The problem was the other part of the definition: according to Judge Coar, Wildflower Works wasn't different enough from other gardens (such as those at Monticello), to be copyrightable, and therefore wasn't covered. He also adopted the logic of a highly controversial 2006 ruling by another appeals court in a battle over the removal of sculpture from a South Boston waterfront park.
According to the brief Karan's team filed, the lower court ruling is so flawed that even work by Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo would fail to qualify for protection. "If this ends up being the end of my legal career," Karan blogged as he was working on the opening brief last spring, "it will be on a high note."

Last January, about the time he started work on the Kelley case, Karan, who's 37 years old, learned that he has a rare and aggressive cancer. He's chronicled his experiences with it, including the onset of a second deadly illness as a complication of his treatment, on his blog at akaran.wordpress.com. When the date for oral arguments came around in September, he blogged that he "actually put on a suit and headed downtown" to hear "my good friend Micah" Marcus, a Kirkland & Ellis associate, present the case. What became clear, he wrote, "was that the judges had already made up their minds in our favor. For each argument that the City lawyer raised, the court responded with one of the arguments that we had briefed and made clear that they thought the City was dead wrong."

"As difficult as it was to make it to the courthouse," Karan continued, "it was a delight watching all of the work on this case reach fruition. And it will really be exciting to get an opinion from the Seventh Circuit that affects the rights of artists across the country."
Last week, after three weeks of silence on the blog, Karan's wife logged an update: he'd been sent home from the hospital, she wrote. "We're giving up on chemo and focusing on trying to get the best quality of life for the time remaining." Over Thanksgiving weekend, he was hospitalized again.

A decision on Chapman Kelley v. Chicago Park District can't arrive too soon.