A century of Chicago design history is brought to life through the art deco façade of the Merchandise Mart

On a chilly November evening, a group of people gathered on the south bank of the Chicago River to admire the facade of a building. The activity of looking at building facades at night is common on the Riverwalk between the Wells Street and Franklin Street Bridges in downtown Chicago, but the cold weather and snow flurries led to a smaller crowd. Since the fall of 2018, the historic Merchandise Mart's 2.5-acre river-facing facade has been a popular attraction, with its size comparable to that of two football fields.

Art on theMART is an ongoing, free public art exhibition that transforms the southern facade of the iconic art deco building, The MART, into the world's largest digital projection screen. Spanning two city blocks and activated by 34 massive projectors built into the Riverwalk, the exhibition features site-specific moving image works by a variety of local, national, and international artists. Some notable artists that have been featured include Charles Atlas, Barbara Kruger, Bisa Butler, and Yuge Zhou. The exhibition was briefly paused early in the pandemic due to restrictions on large gatherings, but has since resumed. One particularly noteworthy display was Nick Cave's Ba Boom Boom Pa Pop Pop, which was a remix of his 2011 film Drive-By, and was on display nightly over the summer and into the fall in conjunction with his first career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. 

The programming for Art on theMART, with the exception of temporary seasonal installations and some partner content, is overseen by a nine-member curatorial advisory board. This board includes individuals such as artist Amanda Williams, the program's executive director Cynthia Noble, and Lydia Ross, director of public art for the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. The works displayed on Art on theMART are commissioned through various methods, including individual invitations, direct proposals, and theme-related Request for Proposal (RFP) processes. 

Art on theMART's latest projection, "Chicago Design Through the Decades," premiered on November 18th and can be viewed every night until December 30th. This projection is not the creation of one artist, but rather a century-long celebration and compilation of Chicago design. The projection starts with the city's art deco era in the 1920s and concludes with contemporary digital portraiture produced using neural networks, a subset of deep learning technology developed at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and the University of Chicago. The "at once nostalgic and whimsical" projection, based on the Chicago Design Archive's (CDA) 3,250-work collection, allows the public to immerse themselves in design history and illustrates the ongoing advancement of the field. 

The Chicago Design Archive (CDA) has grown significantly since its launch in 2002 as a slide-based collection to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the Society of the Typographic Arts. Initially, the CDA was created to be an "exclusive and permanent online record of design excellence" for graphic design from the 1920s to the present. However, over time, the CDA has expanded to include industrial, product, and experiential design that is produced in and related to the city of Chicago. 

The Chicago Design Through the Decades project, which took three years to complete, was a cross-institutional collaborative effort led by a team of individuals from various institutions. Daria Tsoupikova, a professor at the UIC School of Design and faculty member at the university’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), Sharon Oiga, a graphic designer and professor at the UIC School of Design who also serves as a director of the CDA, and Guy Villa Jr., a fellow graphic designer and assistant professor at Columbia College Chicago, initiated the project. They were joined by fellow CDA directors Jack Weiss, Cheri McIntyre, and Lauren Meranda, as well as NASA science animator Krystofer Kim and the EVL’s Fabio Miranda. The installation also includes a musical element, created by musician Louis Schwadron of Sky White Sound. The project is dedicated to Wayne Stutzer, a founder and director of the CDA who passed away in 2020. 

Chicago's Merchandise Mart is a building that has a unique design pedigree, and it is home to a global design center that features over 150 showrooms, as well as the offices of architects, interior designers, creative firms, and tech companies. The building, which was completed in 1930 as a wholesale warehouse for retailer Marshall Field & Company, was designed by Alfred P. Shaw for Chicago firm Anderson, Probst & White. The Merchandise Mart is not famous for its height, but for its remarkable heft. Rising 18 floors with a 25-story tower at its center, the rectangular Near North Side landmark, rebranded by current owner Vornado Realty Trust as simply The MART, was the largest commercial building in the world upon its opening at a whopping 4 million square feet. 

“I was interested [in the proposal] for a lot of reasons,” said Noble of Chicago Design Through the Decades. “For one, the idea made sense for what The MART is and its identity in terms of what happens inside the building as a place of art, technology, and design.” 

Vornado, a real estate giant, introduced Art on theMART in September 2018 as a unique public art program that is fully funded by the company. The City of Chicago closely collaborated with Vornado on this project, which has transformed the exterior of The MART, a limestone and terra cotta building, into the latest and largest Chicago site to combine public art with architecture. This program builds upon the city's long-standing tradition of incorporating accessible and mostly sculptural artistic commissions into the public realm. 

According to Noble, Art on theMART creates a layered visual effect that attracts a large number of viewers to the exterior of the iconic building, while also displaying artistic expressions that offer a fresh perspective. She referred to this as a "new path forward." 

“Like any architectural form that addresses a certain style or emerges from a vocabulary of style—art deco, in this case—certain narratives of the period from which it emerged come attached,” explained Noble. “I see Art on theMART as adding to the narrative and in some cases even changing it.” 

According to Noble, Nick Cave's recent projection is a prime example of the shift towards public art that addresses important and relevant issues such as systemic racism. The projection is exuberant and visually stunning, and it serves to challenge the traditional narrative of architectural forms. Noble believes that by compiling a collection of proposals like this, we can spark important conversations about the issues that matter most in our society today.