When the Chicago Park District announced last month that it had hired a New York landscape architect to redesign the northeast corner of Grant Park on a $45 million budget, including the controversial site of the new Chicago Children’s Museum, there was no mention of an ongoing legal battle over what it’s already done in that area. But there’s a decision pending in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals that’s expected to have repercussions for artists and public art all over the country. The case addresses the question of whether artists have the legal right to protect their work from mutilation or destruction.
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According to the brief Karan’s team filed, the lower court ruling is so flawed that even work by Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo would fail to qualify for protection. “If this ends up being the end of my legal career,” Karan blogged as he was working on the opening brief last spring, “it will be on a high note.”
As he was preparing to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Wildflower Works, Kelley says, he was called to a meeting with Park District staff members who jolted him by announcing that the garden was about to get a makeover. He protested, but within a week the surgery was under way. More than half of the 68,000-square-foot garden was removed, and the shape of what remained was radically changed. The twin ovals were cut down to rectangles, fenced in by incongruous hedges, and surrounded by high-maintenance lawn and masses of rose bushes. Kelley told me it cost the Park District more than $700,000 to install this meaningless hodgepodge, which subsequently required twice-weekly watering. He argues that he should have at least been given a chance to move the artwork that he considered the culmination of his long career. His lawsuit charges the Park District with breach of contract and violation of his rights under the 1990 federal Visual Artists Rights Act. (The Park District did not return calls for comment.)
Last January, about the time he started work on the Kelley case, Karan, who’s 37 years old, learned that he has a rare and aggressive cancer. He’s chronicled his experiences with it, including the onset of a second deadly illness as a complication of his treatment, on his blog at akaran.wordpress.com. When the date for oral arguments came around in September, he blogged that he “actually put on a suit and headed downtown” to hear “my good friend Micah” Marcus, a Kirkland & Ellis associate, present the case. What became clear, he wrote, “was that the judges had already made up their minds in our favor. For each argument that the City lawyer raised, the court responded with one of the arguments that we had briefed and made clear that they thought the City was dead wrong.”
