terracotta ornament from the Garrich Theatre Building, Chicago, Louis Henry Sullivan

Artwork Overview

Louis Henry Sullivan, terracotta ornament from the Garrich Theatre Building, Chicago
Louis Henry Sullivan, terracotta ornament from the Garrich Theatre Building, Chicago
Louis Henry Sullivan
terracotta ornament from the Garrich Theatre Building, Chicago
1892
Louis Henry Sullivan
1856–1924
terracotta ornament from the Garrich Theatre Building, Chicago, 1892
Where object was made: United States
Material/technique: terracotta; pigment
Dimensions:
Object Height/Width/Depth (Height x Width x Depth): 30 x 47 x 11.5 cm
Object Height/Width/Depth (Height x Width x Depth): 11 13/16 x 18 1/2 x 4 1/2 in
Credit line: Gift of the KU School of Architecture
Accession number: 1978.0010
Not on display
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Images

Label texts

Empire of Things
This architectural fragment is one element from a larger design by Louis Sullivan for a building in Chicago, home to well-known architects and designers of the Prairie School (a late 19th- and early 20th-century Midwestern American architectural style). During the 1970s many important Prairie School structures were demolished to make way for large commercial complexes, and museums scrambled to preserve decorative fragments of Chicago’s architectural heritage. Sullivan’s prairie-style designs emphasized the unification of the exterior of a building with its surroundings as well as a reverence for natural materials. His motifs borrowed from nature but took a highly stylized form. The sense of order and symmetry seen here would have echoed the repetition of form in the architecture for which it was a part.
Archive Label 1999: Here are ceramics on a much larger scale than any of the other objects in this exhibition. Along with George Elmslie's ornaments nearby, these terracotta tiles from a building facade represent the use of ceramics in the service of architecture. They were originally painted in several colors, traces of which can be seen on one of these two fragments. The second one shows remnants of the paint-removal process. The numbers stamped on top may indicate that these were made in a mold.

Exhibitions

Empire of Things
Kris Ercums, curator
Kate Meyer, curator
2016–2021
Empire of Things
Kris Ercums, curator
Kate Meyer, curator
2013–2015
Conversation IV: Construction/Destruction
Bertram Lyons, curator
2008–2009

Citations

Hyland, Douglas, and Marilyn Stokstad, eds. Catalogue of the Sculpture Collection: Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art. Lawrence, Kansas: Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, 1981.

Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas. The Register of the Spencer Museum of Art 5, no. 6, Fall (1978):