Art and Materiality: Unlocking Stories Embedded in the Materials of a Gilded Age Mansion

Iker Gil: In 2019, the Driehaus Museum launched A Tale of Today, a multi-year initiative that includes exhibitions that invite leading contemporary artists to respond to the Nickerson Mansion. How did Materialities come to be part of this initiative?

Giovanni Aloi: In 2021, I curated an exhibition with Andrew Yang for the SAIC galleries called Earthly Observatory that focused on the ways in which artists engage with approaches, aesthetics, and methodologies that help us reconsider our relationship with nature at a time of crisis. The Driehaus Museum invited me to curate an exhibition for them after that show. I was given carte blanche and I immediately expressed interest in the idea of commissioning original works of art that responded to the materials in the house. This had never been done at the Driehaus Museum, and I knew that it might become an issue because of the costs involved in this type of approach. However, Executive Director Lisa Key and Director of Collections and Exhibitions Sally-Ann Felgenhauer enthusiastically embraced my vision, supporting the artists and me through the long process involved in making a complex exhibition like Materialities come to life.

IG: The Nickerson Mansion is a meticulously restored Gilded Age building built in 1883 for Samuel M. Nickerson and Matilda P. Nickerson. For the exhibition, you invited fourteen artists to respond to a material present in the building. Did you identify the material you wanted to explore before selecting the artists or did you select the artists who then identified the material?

GA: We held an open call in summer 2023. We wanted artists from the Chicago area to have an opportunity to engage with the building and its history, one that is entwined to that of the city’s re-emergence from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. We initially solicited a statement of interest that clearly illustrated the relationship between artist and material to make sure we would end up working with artists who already understood the concept of “new materialism.” The selected artists were then invited to visit the Nickerson Mansion, and then met with me multiple times throughout the past couple of years. At the beginning of the process, a Driehaus Museum staff member led an incredibly informative tour for the artists, which focused on the vast majority of materials in the house, sharing histories of provenance and helping us get a better sense of the roles these materials played in the social realities inscribed by the building. Artists were allowed to choose a material of their choice and to also suggest in which room of the house the piece should be exhibited. I then assigned rooms based on the curatorial vision and narrative flow of the exhibition.

IG: The works presented in the exhibition cover a spectrum of approaches and media, from video and audio installations to glass, wood, and paper. Can you talk about the process of how the work developed with the artists?

GA: Materialities is the result of very close collaborations with the participating artists over the span of nearly two years—in-person meetings, piles of email, and zoom conversations. Of particular importance were the in-person gatherings where artists would meet at the museum to share the progress on their work with me, museum staff, and other artists. In the end, this close way of working generated a conceptual and aesthetic cohesiveness across the works of art that I don’t think would have manifested itself otherwise.

Identifying the particular room in which a piece should go was a balancing act between the artist’s vision and my own within the context of the many limitations that a building like the Nickerson Mansion entails. As Lisa Key likes to say, “this is a ‘no nails’ museum!” The interiors are delicate and must be preserved, so from the beginning, artists had to carefully consider a number of variables and challenges that usually do not apply to more conventional exhibition spaces.

IG: Through the development and installation of those works, what type of stories were the artists able to bring forward?

GA: Some artists like Rebecca Beachy, Olivia Block, and Jonas N.T. Becker explored, through a range of media, the conception of nature and extraction that made the industrial revolution possible. It is through practices like coal mining, hunting, farming, and lumbering that Chicago emerged from the fire as a unique capital of modernity and that buildings as exceptional as the Nickerson Mansion could come to life. Jefferson Pinder and Ebony Patterson explore issues of accessibility: who wasn’t allowed into the building and why? Through their work, they remind us that the social structures of the Gilded Age were highly exclusive and that racial and social segregation were deeply embedded within the architectural framework of the building. Laleh Motlagh, Edra Soto, Bobbi Meier, Dakota Mace, Richard Hunt, and Luftwerk explore conceptions of “making home” as both metaphorical and physical endeavors: how do objects and architectural designs inscribe identity constructs that we need in order to construct who we are? Industry of the Ordinary and Barbara Cooper focus on stories that can no longer be recovered and told. Every artist, in their own unique way, adds to the complex picture presented by the exhibition through an original response to a material.

IG: Olivia Block’s Lowlands, Beth Lipman’s Sphenophyllum and Chains, and Jonas N. T. Becker’s 1810, 1833, 1880 connect the materiality of the house with ecological systems, some existing and others extinct. Can you talk about the different ways nature and materiality are explored in the context of the exhibition?

GA: Materialities invites visitors to experience the Nickerson Mansion through lenses other than the traditional ones provided by architecture, design, and art history. When encountered through the frameworks of these disciplines, materials are oftentimes, if not always, contextualized in relation to their preciousness, rarity, or refinement. We are then invited to quickly move on to appreciating the sophisticated carvings and moldings but not to think of the materials in question as entities that are worthy of our attention in their own right because of their histories, genealogies, and interconnectedness to cultures and ecologies. That is why my original brief to the artists was to identify a material and to take the visitor to a point of origin external to the house—cultural and/or natural—and produce an artwork that might return us within its walls with a richer understanding of its identity and the roles it plays within the architectural complex of the house. From coal to wood, to tin tiles, leaves, and spandex, to Cor-Ten steel, and clay dug up from the bed of the Chicago River, every artist exceeded my expectations in how they responded to the materiality of the space.

IG: During the opening of the exhibition, you mentioned the relationship between Materialities and taxidermy. Can you explain the influence that taxidermy has in your interest in materiality, and how that relates to the concept of “new materialism”?

GA: I became interested in the insistent presence of taxidermy in contemporary art in the early 2000s as many artists turned to the medium to critically address our fraught relationship with nature at a time of unprecedented crisis. My curiosity was especially drawn by these artists’ sense of urgency to engage with real animal skins, oftentimes discarded trophies or remodeled furs. It then appeared clear that the animal skin was essential to the meaning of the work and that it delivered messages that were intrinsic to its material existence—it had to be part of the work, there was no alternative. This led me to more deeply research the work of artists, some of whom ended up in Materialities, who engage with the same radical commitment to a broad range of materials in their practice. At the core of their approaches, oftentimes, are the philosophical convictions of a relatively recent movement called “new materialism,” which says that materials are never inert; they resonate with their genealogies and ecologies, and are charged with agency. Unlike the artists of the past who were taught to think of materials as passive media to mold into shape and bring to life, to the artists I am working with, materials are already alive in many actual, poetic, and metaphorical ways. These artists thus engage in negotiations and collaborations with materials, rather than dominate them—they listen to the material to find out where it might take them.

IG: The nineteenth-century building was built as a house for a privileged couple in a privileged society. How does the exhibition’s focus on materiality use that context to expand the narrative of what the building represents now?

GA: When we look carefully, all our cultural institutions, public and private, are historically deeply dependent on the extreme wealth of families and individuals who championed the arts. The Nickerson Mansion wears its soul on its sleeve—the opulence and sophistication is extraordinary—but I think that, in the arts and in architecture, privilege and outrageous wealth is what have given us some of the greatest marvels. If we see the Nickerson Mansion only as a symbol of privilege, then we are missing the point. The most beautiful cathedrals are the result of social exploitation and expropriation, but I don’t think that many people would deny the beauty and cultural relevance of the artistic genius they embody. A building, as a complex artifact, is always more than a symbol of something else.

Following this line of thinking, I refrained from engaging with the building in a way that was designed to stigmatize the Nickersons or the Fishers [the family who lived in the Nickerson mansion between 1900 and 1919] for being wealthy, but I think that a critically realistic vein runs through all the works in the exhibition. The attention on materiality as an access point to untold or marginalized narratives is a way to decenter the people who lived in the house as the protagonists of a story that has a lot more to say than to speak about wealth.

IG: I am guessing that, for some of the artists included in the exhibition, it was the first time that they were presenting their work in such a unique environment. How did the dialogue with that environment enrich or challenge their process and work?

GA: I think that, as we discussed in every meeting with the artists, it was important to create an object that could be seen as aesthetically integrated but also dissonant enough with the aesthetics of the building to stand out as an external commentary instead of as an existing piece of the collection. Negotiating that tension was one of the most important challenge the artists and I had to face. But I also think that the space, with its exuberance, set a keynote to which the artists pitched their contributions in response.

IG: How has this exploration of the multiple narratives embedded in materials influenced your thoughts about the built and natural environment?

GA: The process is always “intra-active,” as Karen Barad would have it. I came to the table with certain expectations and understandings about what materials in art might say and how they may say it, and by working with these artists I have greatly expanded my original conceptions. It was particularly interesting to see how some artists like Laleh Motlagh and Rebecca Beachy engaged with the material of their choice as part of a broader autobiographical process in which interconnectedness manifested in multiple and poignant ways. Or how the scars of Jonas N.T. Becker’s logs blurred the boundaries between the fictitious categories of nature and art. I am now working on a book on this very subject and I am interested in mapping more of this interestingly generative moment where the collision of different sociocultural spheres is bolstered by the agency and vibrancy of materials. I think that this will be a very relevant strand of contemporary art-making in the near future.