Early for a jazz concert at the Chicago Cultural Center a couple months ago, I wandered into the Project Onward gallery, met artist Fernando Ramirez, and agreed to come back after the show to sit for a portrait. The starting rate for a single likeness at the gallery is $10, but this was a double of my husband and myself, executed in colored pencil. Inspired by a sample piece that Ramirez had on display, showing President Obama set against iconic images of Hawaii and Chicago, I also paid a little extra to get a skyline in the background. The total cost was $30, and I’m hugely fond of the result.
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Ramirez is one of 33 artists with mental and/or developmental disabilities who work regularly in the big open studio adjacent to the gallery, at the south end of the Cultural Center’s main floor. Born into a family of artists in Mexico, he’s been a Chicagoan since the age of three and turned down a chance to go to the School of the Art Institute because, he says, it seemed unaffordable even with a partial scholarship. He’s suffered from recurring bouts of reality-bending mental illness since a younger brother’s suicide about a decade ago. “Now I can spot it coming on,” he says, “and I know I have to settle down and get some medical help, and it’ll either go away or I have to check myself into the hospital.” His richly colored figurative images are inspired by history, myth, and Botticelli. He says he loves to work in the studio, where he feeds off the energy of “the other guys.”
Lentz and Jackson were both staffers at Gallery 37, a city arts program that serves 14- to 21-year-old Chicagoans. But Lentz says the pieces that interested them most were created by the kids with disabilities. “When you look at art by teenagers, you see a lot of the same stuff,” Lentz says. They’re cartoons and the sort of things assigned in art class: still lifes, figure studies. “After you’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of those, along comes [work by] a person with autism who’s coming from a completely different place. It just announces itself. There’s no comparison.”
Prices range up to $2,000. Samples can be seen on the Project Onward website (projectonward.org).
