Murals: I - Exploration II - Fort Dearborn III - The New City IV - Float Bridge and I & M Canal V - Three Swing Bridges VI - The Great Fire VII - Three Bridges VIII - Columbian Exposition IX - Reversal of the Waters X - Michigan Avenue Bridge XI - Grant Park and the Burnham Plan XII - A Century of Progress XIII - The South Branch XIV - The North Branch XV - The Main Branch XVI - The Riverwalk Artwork copyright 2000 Ellen Lanyon All rights reserved Acknowledgements by Ellen Lanyon Essay by Michael Rooks

Ellen Lanyon: Riverwalk Gateway The story of Chicago had been prophesied sixteen years before the city became incorporated: Whenever men have become skillful architects at all, there has been a tendency in them to build high. John Ruskin, Lectures on Architecture and Painting, 1853 Ellen Lanyon's murals commissioned for Chicago's Riverwalk Gateway tell the story that Ruskin could only have imagined. They follow the rise of Chicago from the time when the area was populated by native Americans, to the exploration of the Chicago river by Marquette and Jolliet in 1673, and finally to the city we know today as the birthplace of the skyscraper. Lanyon's painted-tile murals, consisting of twenty-eight separate panels including sixteen chronological narratives, chart the significance of the river, the historic reversal of its waters in 1900. The rapid growth of Chicago during the nineteenth-century established Chicago as the shipping center and livestock capital of the mid-continent. Moving toward the modern city, Lanyon gives us a shadowing vision of the epic inferno of 1871 and Chicago's Phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes. The Columbian Exposition of 1893, which brought such skillful architects as Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham to Chicago, is the subject of one vignette, while another, the legendary amusement park Riverview, echoes the Exposition's architectural novelty. Lanyon parodies the Exposition's role as seedbed of serious culture in Chicago by setting up the comparison with Riverview and its decidedly low-brow attractions. Although Lanyon has had a noted and influential presence in Chicago art for over fifty years, Riverwalk Gateway is her first work of public art in the city. It is the result of her interest in architecture as metaphor for the collective human spirit of a city representing the aspriations, imagination, successes, and failures of its citizenry. For example, the subject of one public commission for a bank in Boston is Nine Notable Women of Boston. Lanyon chose to depict each woman positioned in front of the architecture of her respective era. Lanyon's other public works include one precursor for the Riverwalk Gateway -- a mural depicting the rise of Chicago, on view in the Illinois State Capital in Springfield. Chicago's architectural landmarks, spanning a century, are shown amassed in front of Michigan Avenue against Frederick MacMonnies improbable fountain for the Columbian Exposition. In her murals for the Riverwalk Gateway, Ellen Lanyon has reminded Chicago of its great achievements and humble beginnings. Honoring the city's industrial and engineering know-how, the resolve of the hardworking Midwesterner, or celebrating the birth of high brow culture in the Midwest, along with the unseemly charms of a carnival. Lanyon gives us a genuine taste of what it means to be a Chicagoan and makes us proud. Michael Rooks, Assistant Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art