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jim work
June 15 - August 25, 2001

Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art will present the exhibition, Jim Work, from June 15 through August 25, at Intuit, 756 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday; admission is free. An opening reception will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. on Friday, June 15.

Born in 1944, Jim Work is an artist with a developmental disability whose large-scale drawings celebrate the American highway system and vernacular architecture of the rural Midwest. In these long, narrow drawings, which range from four to 300 feet in length, Work creates a seemingly endless and elaborate maze of underpasses and overpasses interspersed with long straight-aways and small villages scattered along the way.

Relying on an aerial view to depict his four-lane highways, Work orders his reality with small directional arrows that run back and forth along the surface of the road, leading the eye around the mazes of overpasses and ramps. Work infuses each highway with its own distinct personality by drawing from an impressive palette of styles and colors.

The highways, oftentimes representing years of work, were created on various materials, ranging from his father's mail to brown paper grocery sacks that have been cut up into smaller puzzle-like pieces and then reassembled with tiny bits of tape running along the seams. He works in a meticulous, painstakingly slow fashion, coloring one square-inch at a time. Then he takes a Popsicle stick, held on edge, rubbing slowly back and forth to create smooth, rich surfaces.

Work lives with his 84-year-old father on the family's farm, surrounded by acres of corn and soybeans. Like the grid system of the surrounding rural landscape, Work's drawings are very linear and orderly. In contrast to the chaotic, fast-paced nature of urban sprawl, his highways and surrounding landscapes are barren of automobiles or people. He imposes the starkness and isolation of his own surrounding landscape and small-town life on urban landscapes. From Work's simple reality of small-town rural life, he imagines the excitement and complexity of the American highway system that leads to faraway, unknown places.

Running concurrently with the Jim Work exhibition is American Masters, an ongoing study collection exhibit featuring art by a dozen major outsider artists, including art and artifacts ranging from dolls from Calvin and Ruby Black’s Possum Trot environment in the Mojave desert to the typewriter used to create Henry Darger’s 15,000-page fantasia.

Intuit is celebrating its 10 th anniversary year in 2001, with a weekend birthday celebration scheduled for September 21-23. For more information, please call Intuit at 312.243.9088.