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Artists Monument comes to Grant Park

Tony Tasset

Artist and Art Professor Tony Tasset speaking at the unveiling of Artists Monument.

Artists Monument, the 80-footlong sculpture created by Tony Tasset, professor of art in the School of Art & Art History, is now a colorful feature in Grant Park near Michigan Avenue and 9th Street. The plan is to permanently relocate the piece to the UIC campus. This is the first showing of Artists Monument in Chicago, following its debut in the 2014 Whitney Biennial at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. Tasset is known for monumental works, including the three-story “Eye” that drew worldwide attention when installed in downtown Chicago’s Pritzker Park in 2010, and a 94-foot-high rainbow over Culver City, Calif. Much of his work is a sophisticated, often sardonic evaluation of Americana, domesticity and the art world. To create Artists Monument, he etched the names of nearly 400,000 artists onto brightly colored acrylic panels. The artists range from household names like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol to emerging artists, some of whom had only a single exhibition to their credit. Tasset listed the artists alphabetically in a democratic tribute to several decades of artistic production. Tasset has taught art at UIC for 27 years. He earned his master of fine arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his bachelor of fine arts at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. His work has been reviewed and featured in Art in America, ArtForum and Flash Art, and appears in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum für Moderne Kunste in Frankfurt. Tasset has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Art Basel Miami Beach; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Kunsthalle Wien, Austria; and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. He has had solo exhibitions at the Rochester Art Center, Rochester, NY; Feigen Contemporary in New York, and Karsten Schubert Ltd. in London. This installation is made possible through collaboration among UIC, Kavi Gupta Gallery, the Chicago Park District, and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. The Chicago appearance of Artists Monument coincides with Tasset’s solo exhibition, "Me and My Arrow," at Kavi Gupta Gallery.