Dozens of sculptures by Chryssa, a queer woman who was a pioneering neon-bending artist in the ‘50s and ‘60s, are now on display at Wrightwood 659, 659 W. Wrightwood Ave., in Lincoln Park.
“Chryssa & New York” features more than 80 works by the artist that were made during her time in New York City, where she emigrated to from Greece. The exhibition runs through July 27.
Chryssa, who died in 2013 and only used her first name professionally, was a leading figure in New York’s avant-garde circles thanks to her innovative approach using light and shadows to activate her sculptures. She also worked with neon, signs and text in creative ways that paved the way for pop artists like Andy Warhol, who she was friends with.
“But her work has been vastly underrecognized,” said co-curator Michelle White, senior curator of the Menil Collection in Houston. “This is not an uncommon story for a woman artist, especially for a woman artist who was ahead of her time.”
White curated the exhibition, which is on the final stop of a national tour, with Megan Holly Witko, external curator for the Beacon, New York-based Dia Art Foundation. It’s the first major survey of Chryssa’s work in 40 years and it sparked Ashley Janke, assistant curator at Wrightwood 659, to research Chryssa’s brief time in Chicago for a subsection within the gallery.
“The best thing that’s come out of the show is that it’s ignited new knowledge and new scholarship,” White said.
Central to the exhibition is Chryssa’s large-scale sculpture “The Gates to Time Square” (1964-1966), which Holly Witko called the artist’s “magnum opus.”
The towering sculpture pays homage to the dazzle of New York’s famous intersection by mixing materials like neon, plexiglass and metal to mirror the signage there. It was restored for this exhibition in partnership with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
Another large piece, “Americanoom,” was created in 1963, when Chryssa pivoted toward working with neon and typography. The sculpture features a grid of six squares, each displaying materials like metal, typography and neon tubing in different ways.
Chryssa gathered her materials by visiting the metal and neon-bending shops that made New York’s signs, White said.
“This [was] pretty out-of-the-box thinking at the time,” White said. “And on top of that, she’s a woman artist, so she’s elbowing her way into these incredibly masculine spaces at a time when women weren’t allowed to do things like bend neon.”
The exhibition also shows some work Chryssa completed prior to her experiments with metal and neon. The “Cycladic Books” series (1954-1957), inspired by ancient Mediterranean art, uses plaster and clay to create boxy figures whose shadows take on varying appearances dependent on lighting.
“She’s really interested in the way in which light is activating these surfaces, and the subtle patterns of light throughout the day or year,” Holly Witko said. “Even her early work like this shows how she was thinking about light as a medium.”
Janke noted that Chryssa was active in Chicago around the ‘70s and ‘80s, when she was commissioned by architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) to create a 70-foot-tall sculpture for one of their buildings at 33 W. Monroe St.
The building, along with the sculpture, was demolished in the early 2000s, Janke said.
“But it was a huge engineering feat to create,” Janke said. “It included over 900 feet of neon tubing and an engineer who helped with the Sears Tower was brought on, so they really were putting together the best and the brightest.”
“Chryssa & Chicago” also includes documents from a proposal Chryssa made to the Art Institute of Chicago for a sculpture,“The Chicago Gates,” similar to the “The Gates of Time Square.” The sculpture never came to fruition, but Janke was able to uncover its design from archival documents.
Because there is no formal archive of Chryssa’s work, many details on her life are still unknown. But the artist is believed to have been a queer woman who had a relationship with artist Agnes Martin.
“There’s a lot of indication they were in a relationship and we believe that to be the case, but [there are] no letters between the two of them that we’ve found,” Holly Witko said. “…How do we address her queer identity without an archive, because that’s something we totally don’t want to erase, but how do we pose it?”
Wrightwood 659 will host a few events about Chryssa’s work, including a panel May 30 at 6 p.m.; a tour of the exhibition June 8 at 2 p.m.; and a documentary screening about her SOM sculpture July 11 at 6 p.m.
Wrightwood 659 is open noon-7 p.m. Friday and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are required for admission, which is $15.
Visit here to buy tickets to view the gallery or attend one of the upcoming events: https://tickets.wrightwood659.org/events