In 1964, an unknown African American woman named Geraldine McCullough, who just a few years earlier had learned to sculpt from her husband Lester, a welder, submitted her 250-pound metal creation into the 159th annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Artists typically participated in the prestigious competition by invitation only — and they were usually veterans of the form.
Skirting the rules, McCullough — who hadn’t been invited — entered her sculpture, entitled “Phoenix,” anyway. It won the George D. Widener Memorial Gold Medal, the competition’s highest honor, catapulting the Chicago-born artist to international renown.
In a June 1964 issue of Ebony magazine, McCullough, a longtime Oak Park resident, described her winning sculpture in the context of what the article’s author called that period’s “surge of Negro militancy, as is seen in the current freedom struggle.”
The statue, the article noted, “is much like the rebirth of the Phoenix, more perfect than the first, which grew, became strong and soared away to the rich land of Egypt.”
The Phoenix, in McCullough’s metallic depiction, looks more like an abstraction with wings than the figurative representation of the mythological bird — its lift paradoxically moored in time, forever based in the ground of human struggle; its precise form subject to human interpretation. This is perhaps the point, as McCullough explained in Ebony.
“It seemed to me that the Negro, crushed so long under the weight of oppression, is now re-born and soaring toward complete freedom. That was the inspiration for ‘Phoenix,’ but actually, what I tried to express in the piece was something more universal … that universal struggle of people and things, their wrestling with adversity, their eventual triumph and the perfection that results from their struggle.”
McCullough, who had a remarkable home and studio in a former CTA repair facility on Lombard Avenue just south of South Boulevard, died in 2008 in Oak Park at the age of 91. By then she had become both an internationally renowned sculptor and a beloved local ambassador of the arts. She was appointed chairwoman of the art department at Rosary College (now Dominican University); her work had been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; and she served on the Oak Park Public Arts Commission; among a diverse range of appointments and honorariums.
Her sculptures dot the landscape across the Chicago area. Her 13-foot-high “Pathfinder” stands in Oak Park’s village hall courtyard at Madison and Lombard and “Phoenix Rising,” a sculpture similar to, but at least three times the size of, the one McCullough entered into the 1964 competition, sits in a park along Fred Hampton Way in nearby Maywood.
But the nine-foot high “Our King, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” may be the McCullough statue that most encapsulates the phoenix-like virtues of resilience, resurgence and struggle that permeate the artist’s body of work.
The statue, which McCullough created in 1973, according to the Smithsonian’s art inventories catalog, once stood outside of the Martin Luther King Plaza Apartments in Chicago’s Garfield Park neighborhood.
Over time, the wooden base of the statue had deteriorated and the work itself was corroding. Rickie Brown, who as a young art student working in the Lawndale neighborhood had once met McCullough in person, said he overheard some people connected to the apartments talk about the possibility of putting it in storage or even throwing it out.
“I couldn’t let that happen,” said Brown, who is now the executive director of the West Side Historical Society.
Brown said he fought for three years, beginning some time in 2011, to acquire the statue. He urged politicians like U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis (7th) and state Rep. La Shawn K. Ford (8th) to write letters of support to ease his acquisition of the statue. He talked to Jacqueline Reed, the founder of the Austin-based Westside Health Authority (WHA), about the possibility of her organization making a home for the work.
“After they finally said they would give it to me … we got a flatbed truck and rushed over there with 20 young men to haul it over here and lift it up where it is now,” Brown said during an interview Saturday, July 18 near the statue’s permanent home — in front of the WHA’s Austin Wellness Center on Chicago’s West Side.
The statue, resurrected, was unveiled as part of the one-year anniversary of state Rep. Ford’s successful effort to rename a portion of Cicero Avenue — from Roosevelt Road to West Grand Avenue — Mandela Road.
The work depicts King as an African chieftain. He holds a Coptic cross in one hand and a Tibetan prayer wheel, capped by a globe, in the other. A dove is perched on his head, while the Nobel Peace medal is affixed to his neck.
“The statue symbolizes a struggle,” said Reed. “It symbolizes what we can build when we come together. When we look at the lives of Mandela and King, we know they struggled. Those men lost their families and were threatened with murder. King died young. But their dreams became realities.”
CONTACT: michael@oakpark.com