Painted into a corner

MEDIEVAL TIMES Participants in Version’s Art War catapult stuffed animals toward the Merchandise Mart during last year’s Artropolis.

Photo: Courtesy of Public Media Institute

Ed Marszewski, founder of the Public Media Institute and Version art festival, had intended to show the work of artists represented by his Reuben Kincaid gallery at NEXT, last weekend’s fair devoted to emerging art that’s part of Artropolis. He never got the chance.

Early last week, Merchandise Mart Properties Inc. (MMPI), the company that organizes Artropolis, discreetly expelled Marszewski from the fest. Then, a few days later, MMPI just as quietly reinstated Marszewski after talks between the two parties.

What exactly transpired between MMPI and Marszewski is the source of much speculation. The first rumor we heard was that Christopher Kennedy, the president of MMPI, became angry when he saw a photograph of his effigy being guillotined during the “Art War” Marszewski organized outside the Merchandise Mart during Artropolis 2007, protesting certain artists’ exclusion from the fair. (That image was published with “All’s fair,” TOC’s article about Marszewski’s alternative art fair Version Fest, in TOC 164. Marszewski provided the photograph.)

Neither Kasey Madden, a spokeswoman for MMPI, nor Kavi Gupta, the Chicago gallery owner who co-organized NEXT, would go on the record about Marszewski’s expulsion. Marszewski initially only confirmed that he was no longer participating in NEXT and told us, “I heard Chris Kennedy was pissed off because of that image.” Given Kennedy’s family history—his father, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968—it’s easy to understand if he found Version’s fake guillotine offensive and cruel. But Mark Falanga, MMPI’s senior vice president, told us the reason Marszewski was excluded from NEXT is because participants in the Art War allegedly vandalized artwork at Artropolis. (A police report from April 27, 2007, states that 15 cyclists threw balloons containing colored water at the Merchandise Mart’s front entrance, hitting a bronze horse sculpture “valued at $50,000” with blue dye.) Falanga says MMPI did not want to put Artropolis’s other exhibitors “at risk from a known vandal.”

Marszewski responded, “We had absolutely nothing to do with the vandalism at the Merchandise Mart.…No charges were pressed. We had our corporate counsel look into it and he said it was Critical Mass [that vandalized the artwork].” The Public Media Institute’s lawyer, Jerry Boyle, corroborates Marszewski’s account. “Ed was going into NEXT as a peace emissary,” Boyle says, “and you don’t shoot a peace emissary.” He reports that Marszewski and Kennedy met last Thursday and smoothed things over. “Ed worked everything out.… He made it clear that they had nothing to do with the incident with the water balloons,” he says.

Although Marszewski was able to launch his new arts magazine Proximity at Artropolis, he did not have enough time to reorganize the Reuben Kincaid booth. The artists whose work he planned to present thus suffer because of something they didn’t do. In the end, those artists are the ones who lost this battle.

Jake Malooley contributed to this article.