Dave Hickey - curator Navy Pier Walk 2002

"I consider juried exhibitions to be an extremely important part of visual culture in the United States, especially in the practice of sculpture where mobility is always an issue.

Art worlds by their very nature tend to become balkanized into regional and generational communities.  The juried show is one of the last remaining modalities designed to break down these vertical and horizontal barries, so I am always happy to participate.

Most of the work in the Navy Pier Walk exhibition was selected from submitted macquettes.  I began by selecting what I considered to be the best and most representive macquettes.  From this group, I selected the works that I thought would be most presentable when executed at scale.  I had no aesthetic agenda when selecting the work beyond the knowledge that a great many of the sculptures would be installed on the pier, in a fabricated environment, so I selected a fairly large percentage of fabricated sculpture.

At the completion of this first part of the process it became apparent that the macquettes I had selected, were for the most part, semi-abstract, semi-figurative work from mid-career artists working in the American Midwest.

But to create a more representative selection of the practice at this moment, I decided to curate into the show some rigorously abstract and rigorously figurative work, as well as work by some younger artists and older artists who work in the southern, eastern and western parts of the country.  (Financial considerations made it impossible to include European and Asian sculptures.)

The resulting exhibition, I think, is a fair survey of outdoor art at this moment.  From my perspective, there were some inevitable disappointments since the finished work did not always live up to the promise of the selected macquettes, but these were more than compensated for by a great many pleasant surprises.  I came away from the whole experience with a deepened respect for the citizens who populate the art world in Chicago and for the many artists who pursue the difficult and demanding practice of making modern art for outdoor settings."

Dave Hickey, art critic, analyst of Western culture and MacArthur Fellow was cited in the December 17, 2001 issue of TIME Magazine as an innovator whose ideas are changing the world.