Plan would turn Merchandise Mart into ‘largest canvas in the world’ for video and art

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For decades, the Merchandise Mart has loomed over the bend in the Chicago River, its great limestone walls projecting stolidity and art deco style.

This fall, the megabuilding’s front wall will become vivid with video images and projected artwork as a permanent nighttime riverfront feature visible from the Riverwalk and Wacker Drive, if a plan announced Sunday by building owners and city officials goes through.

"Art on theMART” will set up an array of high-powered digital projectors that will coat the Mart’s river-facing front wall in a range of artworks. A digital sample showed colorful shapes gradually resolving themselves into a still image of blues great Muddy Waters across the 2-½-acre canvas.

The project will cost about $8 million to install and up to $500,000 a year to run, said Mart Chief Operating Officer Myron Maurer, senior executive in Chicago of Vornado Realty Trust, which owns The Mart (and officially renamed it “theMART” several years ago, Maurer said) and is footing the bill.

Maurer and city officials including Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events chief Mark Kelly spoke at a news conference Sunday afternoon to announce details and refinement of their plan, first made public last March.

Emanuel said he will introduce an ordinance at the next City Council meeting, on Wednesday, that will allow the projectors to be installed under a 30-year license, passage of which is required for the project to proceed.

“It brings two great strands of the city of Chicago together,” architecture and public art, Emanuel said at the riverfront news event. “What we all know as the Merchandise Mart will now become the largest canvas in the world.”

Said Kelly, “I’m confident this will join the pantheon” of Chicago public art — along with Cloud Gate (the Millennium Park sculpture often called The Bean), the Daley Plaza Picasso and Kerry James Marshall’s new “Rush More” mural at the Chicago Cultural Center.

The “large-scale architectural projection project,” pitched as a continuation of Chicago’s 2017 Year of Public Art, is being managed by Obscura Digital, a San Francisco firm that has guided temporary light projections on structures including the Empire State Building, the Vatican and the Sydney Opera House.

“What we’re doing here is going to be the largest permanent installation in the world,” said Maurer in an interview before the news conference.

Details are still being worked out, but he projects an opening in October of a display that could run for two hours a night, maybe five nights a week and 10 months out of the year.

A curatorial board that he hopes to have in place this spring will oversee the display, and it will include representatives from the Mart, the city and the arts community.

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