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Conducting Collage: Chuck Scalin detailing the design of this installation at The Highpoint galleries
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Walking and Talking: Chuck Scalin describes his collage process at The Highpoint galleries.
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Thirteen Hundred Pushpins: Chuck Scalin regards a papier-mache skull form that he transformed into a totemic-like object.
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Hands On: Chuck Scalin's hands, mid-explanatory gesticulation, reflected in a display of his influences
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Sweet Home, Chicago: "I didn't know I was making mail art," Chuck Scalin says of his fastidious redesign of the envelopes containing letters to his future wife, artist Mim Golub.
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Tools of the Trade: The glue that holds things together amid Chuck Scalin's collage and assemblage materials at The Highpoint galleries
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Crimes and Misdemeanors: These mysterious faces formed part of the "evidence boxes" created for Chuck Scalin's "Body of Evidence" work that morphed from boxes to performance and a book.
On July 10, an exuberant Chuck Scalin turned 80 on the opening night of his 30th solo show of collage and assemblage in a 50-year professional life. The buoyant opening at The Highpoint galleries in Scott’s Addition — accompanied by ebullient jazz, a burbling crowd excited to be around each other after the past year, and plenty to eat and drink — felt like a spring awakening in the middle of summer. An appropriate sensation around Scalin, who works to regenerate his approach within his chosen discipline.
“I'm a gleaner,” he explains later during a walk-and-talk tour around The Highpoint spaces. “I collect things. I pick things up off the street, I find things: metal, paper, materials from shopping at flea markets. ‘Maybe I can use this in something someday.’ I’m a recycler.”
As the show demonstrates, Scalin during his processes and studio experimentation has utilized a variety of materials that one doesn’t necessarily associate with collage, including glass, ceramics and metal. “I didn’t plan to make those happen,” he says. “They came out of the process, of trying out something new, ‘Let’s see if this’ll work.’ ”
His adventures in art and academia began in 1959, at the University of Illinois college campus at Navy Pier. The massive building caused students to slip on roller skates or bicycle to get from one end to the other. “I walked, for the exercise, and I didn’t know how to skate,” Scalin recalls. The building, miserably cold during the winters on Lake Michigan and over-warm in the summer, nonetheless provided him with lessons in art-making that influenced the rest of his life.
His was a one-year program that required transfer to another school, and he chose the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — he’d taken Saturday courses there in high school. Enrolled for college, he studied graphic design and illustration. Scalin didn’t it realize then, but many of his instructors came directly out of the influential modern Bauhaus movement. Scalin credits his instructors at the institute with launching him toward the style of design that has captivated him ever since.
But in his mid-20s he found work as a “Mich Man,” that is, an art director for advertising firms along Michigan Avenue — think mid-1960s Midwestern “Mad Men.” After designing product packaging for Helene Curtis cosmetics and Ultra Sheen, he moved to Mercury Records, where he created album covers for artists such as The Smothers Brothers, Leslie Gore, comedian Moms Mabley and Johnny Mathis.
“No credit ever appeared for the designer,” he explains, “only the agency.”
After three intense years of late nights, early client meetings and cocktail-fueled lunches, he decided to leap from what to him felt like a pressure cooker into what he most desired: fine art.
He gained a master’s degree at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. While there, he also married a Chicago college friend, artist Mim Golub. Years later he made collages from letters he’d sent to her, and they’re on view at the show.
“I plan very little,” Scalin says of his art. “Start off with one little piece, whatever it is, and of course the color is important, the composition. I love working with textures.”
This might also apply to how his professional life proceeded, with innovation rather than with hesitation.
One day, when considering employment options, he caught sight of a posting for what was then Richmond Professional Institute, which in the following fall changed its name to Virginia Commonwealth University. He’d never heard of Richmond. But he departed New York’s LaGuardia Airport dressed in his sharpest suit thinking his acceptance unlikely.
When the plane touched down in Richmond, it seemed a mile away from the terminal. He asked after his luggage, and an attendant pointed to a Quonset hut. Then he needed to know the whereabouts of Gate 1. “It’s right there,” the baggage claims clerk told him. “It’s the only one we have.”
Since then, changes have come to Richmond, some of which Scalin brought with him.
He retired in 2003 from VCU — “They hired me immediately,” notes Scalin — where since 1968 he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in the department of Communication Arts and Design. He founded and led the Design Center and went on to teach at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He joined the 1708 Gallery and also co-founded and directed the Artspace Gallery. There, he introduced the annual holiday-time “Think Small” shows that bring affordable petite works by many artists designed in the maximum dimensions of 3 by 3 by 3 inches. (The 11th iteration is this year.) Artist residencies allowed him to go abroad, including the Cite International des Arts in Paris.
His assemblages have transformed from mysterious boxes loaded with apparent clues of strange goings-on that themselves evolved into performance pieces and a book, which sprung out of the former Ghostprint Gallery as the “Body of Evidence."
The Scalins’ son, Noah, is also an accomplished maker. (The three have shown together with other artistic family members). The father became drawn in to his son’s skulls project, in this case 50 artists who used papier-mache skull forms as their canvases. Scalin, in the gallery holding his own creation as Hamlet would regard Yorick’s skull, mimicked himself contemplating. He hit upon decorating the shape with 1,300 pushpins. Standing there with this gleaming perforated skull, he composed himself as a 21st-century Readymade vanitas.
A reminder that what succeeds artists are their creations.
“Collage: 1971-2021” is on view at The Highpoint galleries through Aug. 27.
