Don Baum, Gertrude Abercrombie, and the Visual Arts in Hyde Park: A Conversation with Charlie Baum

July, 19, 2:00 pm | FREE and public

Artist, curator, and impresario Don Baum was a fixture in Chicago starting in the 1950s. Initially affiliated with the artists known as the Monster Roster – Leon Golub, Ted Halkin, Cosmo Campoli, Dominick Di Meo, Seymour Rosofsky – Baum assumed the role of Chairman of Exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center in the south side neighborhood in 1956, and he oversaw and helped curate HPAC's activities into the 1970s. Founded in 1939, HPAC was one of several important art sites in Hyde Park, including the Renaissance Society and the 57th Street Art Colony. Painter Gertrude Abercrombie, who would become one of Baum's closest compatriots, lived in the 57th Street Art Colony early in her career, bumping elbows with other WPA-era artists like Emil Armin, Charles Biesel, and Frances Strain, all of whom, including Abercrombie, participated in the very first show at HPAC. At an early stage, Harold Haydon, an artist and critic who taught at the University of Chicago, was HPAC's exhibition director, but once Baum took the helm things began to shift from a more conventional regional art center to the explosive Imagist brooder that HPAC would become. Working with artists Jim Nutt and Jim Falconer, Baum helped assemble small group shows, starting with the Hairy Who, with multiple exhibitions spotlighting their iconoclastic new work. In the exhibition Nuth'n to Hyde, CvsD has brought the two epochs of Hyde Park together again, featuring works by Abercrombie (including a wonderful canvas in her Countess Nerona series that was unveiled at the Renaissance Society in 1945), Haydon, and Campoli alongside artists who emerged in the '60s including Nutt, Falconer, and Karl Wirsum. In the middle, as a bridge, the man who facilitated the Imagists and was executor of the Gertrude Abercrombie estate, Don Baum occupies a position of great significance, the kind that he demanded when he curated the show Don Baum Sez: "Chicago Needs Famous Artists" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1969.

In this rare conversation, Don Baum's son Charlie Baum sits with John Corbett to discuss his father's legacy, revealing little known facts about Don's relationship with Gertrude Abercrombie, his work as a painter and sculptor, and his efforts to build and maintain HPAC.