Come to Chicago and Sit a Spell in Great Outdoors

Street art comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes--from ethereal angels to earthbound cows.

Earlier this year, Los Angeles spread 6-foot-high models of angels around the city. Two years ago, Chicago went with street art in the form of 320 hand-painted, fiberglass cows that grazed throughout the city. The bovine urban art proved popular with Chicagoans and tourists alike, New York followed suit. Now Chicago is milking it again.

This year the streets of the city are filled with life-size furniture: “Suite Home Chicago.”

“We knew that after the success the city had with ‘Cows on Parade,’ we wouldn’t create another fiberglass animal public art exhibit,” Nathan Mason, curator of special projects for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, said about the year’s outdoor art project that went on display Friday. “We chose furniture because it is something everyone can relate to. Now that it is out on the streets, we see tourists and locals alike enjoying this decorated furniture as they walk through downtown Chicago.”

Local artists, sponsored by private citizens or businesses, hand paint the furniture--a suite is composed of a fiberglass sofa, chair, ottoman and television console. The pieces are then deposited to specified public sites in downtown Chicago. Each weighs about 40 pounds and is attached to 800-pound concrete blocks to ensure that it is not picked up as . . . souvenirs.

Already, 350 pieces are scattered throughout the urban core. The Department of Cultural Affairs expects the number will be 500 by August. Most of the works are outside upscale retail stores along Michigan Avenue. Anyone can kick back and relax on the artworks.

Cow-art veterans (and sisters) Maryanne Warton and Virginia Sweeney, who have a commercial graphics art company, Sisters Too, were sponsored this year by three different companies--a cruise line, a corrugated box manufacturer and an airline. Working in acrylics, Maryanne said one sofa clocked in at about 118 hours of painting time, including the shellacking. “You can’t put on enough coats of varnish,” she explained, “because everyone is going to sit on it and pet it, besides [there are] the elements--heat and sun.” Maryanne estimated that there are probably 10 to 12 coats of varnish on each piece.

This was the first piece of public art for artist Michael Dopp, who said that he paints, in oils, “representational landscape paintings.” Sponsored by a group of individuals, he painted a variety of landscapes on a single suite. “It was nice because my paintings usually go to galleries or stay in homes or offices where as this was going to be outside for months in the public eye, and people can sit on it, sleep on it, eat lunch on it. It is pretty wild.” Dopp added, good-humoredly, that he found himself climbing over the sofa to check out the back of it, just to keep the entire picture in mind.

When the show wraps up on Oct. 13, items from “Suite Home Chicago” will either go to the sponsors or be donated to charity. For more information about the program, see https://www.chicagourbanart.org.

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Candace A. Wedlan can be reached at candace.wedlan@latimes.com