Introduction

Summary

The story of modernism and/in the US could do worse than begin in August 1967, when Gwendolyn Brooks – Chicagoan, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner, and recent convert to the Black Arts Movement – read occasional poems at two dedication ceremonies for two very different pieces of public art in her home city. Her first reading was of “The Chicago Picasso” at the unveiling of an unnamed, 50-foot-tall Pablo Picasso sculpture outside Chicago’s Civic Center, a building that – then as now – housed most of Cook County’s circuit courts. Brooks’ invitation came from Chicago’s formidable mayor, Richard Daley, who cemented his notoriety the following year by orchestrating the heavy-handed policing of the combustive 1968 Democratic convention. For Brooks, the Picasso sculpture was art with a capital “A.” As she put it in her poem, “Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms.”