You’ve heard of the “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” Now, get ready for Riverside’s own traveling painting.
Village Trustee Joseph Fitzgerald recently commissioned “About Town,” a large painting by Chicago-based visual artist David Heo. The painting features a man and a woman sitting on separate benches in a green park with one of Riverside’s iconic gas lamps. The man is looking at a copy of the village’s general plan that Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed in 1869 while the woman takes in the scene around her.
Fitzgerald said he hopes to work with businesses and organizations within the Riverside community to rotate who hosts the painting in order to spark conversation about the village and its ties to Olmsted’s other projects.
“The whole theme of it is connecting Central Park’s lineage, which Olmsted made, with Riverside’s identity,” he said. “It’s a conversation-starter. It elucidates Riverside as a whole and how the lineage came to be.”
As of Friday, Feb. 27, “Around Town” is making its home at Riverside Foods for two or three weeks, Fitzgerald said. Its next home isn’t certain yet, but if the project picks up steam, Fitzgerald said he hopes it can transcend the village’s borders.
“Riverside is the first planned community in the U.S. We have the opportunity to have a rare, direct connection with Olmsted and some of the other areas that he’s done, not only in New York but across the country,” he said. “We recently got the Illinois state marker here, but I still think that we’re a little underrecognized as to the importance of what we’ve done and how pretty it is here. I’ve always been involved in art, and this is a way to tell the story and make it more broad and exciting.”
He said the project was inspired by a trip to Portland, Oregon.
“Someone asked, ‘Where are you from?’ Like, ‘Oh, I’m from Chicago.’ ‘Chicago proper?’ I’m like, ‘No, a little place down the way. It’s a small community called Riverside.’ [They’re like,] ‘Oh, Olmsted’s Riverside!’” he said. “Olmsted built a number of parks out in that area.”
Fitzgerald said the project ties into his goal as a trustee to designate Quincy Street as an arts district within Riverside.
“It doesn’t mean that we have to knock down buildings to do this. We have the Arts Center there, we have Higgins Glass, we have [Colorsmith] Stained Glass, we have the craft distillery. We’ve already got to the bones to do that. Why can’t we start edging our way towards that?” he said. “It’s wonderful to see the activation of businesses and space over on Burlington, but it’d be nice to be able to bridge that over into this area as well.”
