Memory, Gesture, and the Making of a Sculpture for the Keller Center

On a sunlit winter day, the Keller Center—absent of students studying in the Harris Family Foundation King Harris Forum, without the vibe of buzzing classrooms, conversation, collaboration—was filled with expectant silence. Seemingly larger, and even more lovely, in its emptiness, there was an air of animation, the space transformed by a new installation of art, a suspended sculpture, by Susan Giles. The piece, stunning in its simplicity and complexity, and fascinating for the technology that produced it, contains a compelling message about the power of collective hope, and of knowledge as the scaffolding that supports change.

Michelle Obama, during her last public address as First Lady, encouraged and exhorted young people to pursue higher education:

“I want our young people to know that they matter, that they belong. So don’t be afraid… Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered. Empower yourselves with a good education, then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise. Lead by example with hope, never fear. And know that I will be with you, rooting for you and working to support you for the rest of my life.”

Inspirational messages like the one Mrs. Obama gave that day can easily vaporize in echoes of good intentions—especially in communities of color like the community she grew up in on Chicago’s South Side, where enduring race-based inequities can bear down on everyday reality, where systemic injustices in housing and health care, employment and education can perpetuate trauma and tragic outcomes in the lives of young people she wished to reach.

Misho Ceko, Senior Associate Dean and COO at Harris, envisioned art installations as a central, vital component of the redesigned Keller Center; a source of inspiration for students at Harris, which is committed to “smarter decision making and better policymaking… by training a new generation of leaders who are driven to change the world and know that making a social impact requires fresh thinking and different approaches.” As noted by Theaster Gates, Senior Advisor for Cultural Innovation and Advisor to the Dean, and a lead artist at the Keller Center. “When I think about the complexity of political and social processes, I am convinced that creative practices are sometimes the most useful tools, and artists, often great allies when trying to imagine new possibilities.”

Seeking an iconic art installation for the lobby, one that would connect the Harris mission with everyday challenges people face in surrounding communities, Ceko discovered a sculpture by Susan Giles, exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2018—her first using a motion detector camera to record gestures, and render them as 3D prints and a laser-cut cardboard sculpture. Ceko recognized an opportunity to memorialize the local legacy of Barack and Michelle Obama: their lives and work in Chicago, and their contribution to UChicago as students and teachers.

The sculpture recently installed at the Keller Center has deep origins within the artist’s own work, which has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, THE MISSION Gallery, and The Renaissance Society; Mixed Greens in New York, Five Years in London, and Galeria Valle Orti in Valencia, Spain. A native of New Jersey, Giles moved to Chicago for graduate school at the School of the Art Institute in the 1990s. She was captivated by Chicago’s architecture; for years, her work focused on buildings as icons and symbols of identity. Giles researched how buildings are held in memory through stories, especially the day-to-day experiences within a building. This led her to make sculptures of buildings, which intersected with an interest in other representations of memory, especially gestures and the cognitive significance of gestures, how they facilitate learning and the development of language.

Giles read about the research at UChicago’s Goldin-Meadow Laboratory—one of the premier gesture labs in the world—and, before that, at the McNeill Gesture Lab, and attended their conferences and symposiums. Their work, and the work of the Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language, also at UChicago, where she will be a guest speaker this spring, enabled Giles to understand how, through gestures, communication can become spatial, become sculptural. Using a motion-detector camera to record movement data using 3D modeling software that creates a 3D drawing, which can be printed with a 3D laser printer, Giles has developed ways to capture and spatially extend these ephemeral movements into sculpture.

When Ceko approached Giles about creating a sculpture for the Keller Center, she was an artist-in-residence at the Hyde Park Art Center. Giles decided to design the sculpture based on the response of students to the speech Michelle Obama gave in January 2017, and met with participants in a youth arts program at Hyde Park Arts Center. A young woman named Madison Grant, at the time a sophomore at Kenwood Academy High School in Hyde Park and already an accomplished chef of Southern cuisine—having taken classes at local culinary institutes, and selected to compete on the Food Network’s “Kids Cook-Off” while still in middle school—described how she remembered and interpreted Obama’s speech:

“She was talking to us about the power that we have… especially with education… It’s a huge privilege and it holds so much power… I know how hard my parents and their parents had to work for it, and I have to continue the things that they’ve started. Knowledge is very powerful.”

At the moment that Grant spoke the word knowledge, the camera captured the movement data of her accompanying, two-handed gesture. Grant’s left hand created a smaller, wavy movement; above, her right hand traced the larger form of an arc. This momentary gesture, captured as three-dimensional points by the camera, is represented in the two-part sculpture, just over 17 feet in length and 10 feet in height, its richly textured cardboard a visual complement to the Keller Center’s organic materials. A set of steel plates, embedded in the sculpture, provide a hidden, structural spine for the piece.

Made from laser printed sheets of half-inch honeycomb cardboard, the sculpture builds, layer upon layer, into a work embodying the beauty of passionate aspiration. Seen from the bottom, it is a solid, foundational mass; seen from above, it is like the tip of an iceberg, mysteriously weighted with unknown depth. The view around its undulating perimeters is a window into many worlds—a chorus of living cells, assembled like an amphitheater, call to mind the Aztec and Egyptian pyramids, or the Great Houses of Pueblo culture in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. The piece, which speaks of connection, movement, and flight, reflecting the massing of space in Harris Family Foundation King Harris Forum, is called Knowledge (Madison).

COVID-19 has occasioned—with its absences, coverings, distancing, and the uncertainties of prolonged postponements—many shifts in the experience of temporal and spatial reality. The experience of collective gathering, sharing virtual and physical space, will continue to take on added dimensions and new meaning. Students and staff returning to Harris have the opportunity to experience their presence at the Keller Center with new purpose. With its primacy of place, art—colorful, provocative, stimulating pieces that are a ubiquitous reminder of the generative power of the creative process and nonlinear, nonbinary thinking—can be a guide and companion in traversing the post-pandemic territory of the 21st century.

The new sculpture, suspended strategically within the sightline of the entrance, at every turn changing shape, depending on one’s perspective, is a graceful, liminal reminder of the gift and potential of imagination, and by extension, of empathy and the power of the collective to reimagine the structures and spaces that govern our lives.