EXTENSIVE FACTS TAKE TIME TO LOAD
J. Z. Jacobson | Art of Today Chicago 1933 | Published by L M Stern, Chicago, 1932
JEAN CRAWFORD ADAMS was born in Chicago. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has painted abroad in Scotland, England, Germany, France, Spain and Italy and, in this country, in New Mexico, California, Florida, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. She is a member of 10 Artists (Chicago), the Chicago Society of Artists and the Arts Club of Chicago and has exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chester Johnson Galleries, locally, and, outside of the city, at the Carnegie Institute, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Detroit Museum, and the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In Chicago she has had one-artist exhibitions at the Art Institute and the Chester Johnson Galleries. She has also had one-artist shows in Milwaukee, Madison, Kansas City, Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and has been awarded prizes by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Englewood Women's Club and the Chicago Society of Artists. She is represented in permanent collections in Baltimore and in Springfield, Illinois. Her work has been written about in Chicago newspapers and periodicals and in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune and The Arts, by Forbes Watson, C. J. Bulliet, Inez Cunningham, Marguerite B. Williams, J. Z. Jacobson, Phil Nesbit and Eleanor Jewett.
When I attempt to analyze what it is that has had the greatest effect on my art I conclude that it is Chicago-Chicago as it is today. It is Chicago resolved into its characteristic elements the hustle and turmoil of this great windy city of ours, its dynamic force, the titanic upheavals of its politics, its hugeness and vitality. As a great philosopher has put it-the seething energy which pervades the atmosphere of our city is the energy wrenched from the thousands of animals slaughtered in our gargantuan slaughter houses. Then there is gangland with its special code of outlaw ethics and its own standard of culture. Also, there is the breath-taking tempo of our commerce and industry. All these forces have a bearing on the inner life of the painters living in Chicago who do not go about with their eyes closed and their ears stopped up; and out of this thundering chaos intermingled with amazing efficiency and order emanate currents of power which may be spiritualized and transmuted into art. Chicago's contribution to art in general-and especially to architecture and literature-is genuinely and distinctively American: American in spirit and in feeling. I believe that within the next decade a great spiritual force, a harmonious force, will enter all art which is really art, from among that produced in Chicago; and consequently there will emerge in our midst something truly great. One's aims and ideals are difficult to put into mere words, for thoughts are not always tangible. I seek fresh vision and am on the lookout for untrodden paths to follow. And I hope that out of this aspiration, together with the experiences and emotions which life brings daily in this roaring metropolis, I will draw ever greater esthetic riches and thus achieve closer approximation to fulfillment in my work.