April 12--You and I know what you would do with one toothpick.
But what would you do with 270,000 of them?
What Wayne Kusy has done with that many toothpicks, give or take, is create a sculpture of the SS America, an ocean liner that sailed the seas from 1939 to 2013. It is 14 feet long, and it took him, he says, "five years, on and off," to make.
The ship/sculpture is the seventh ship in Kusy's sculptural armada, a body of work that might pale in comparison with that of such prolific artists as Pablo Picasso or Chicago's own Tony Fitzpatrick, but one that has, over the last three decades, made him well-known in certain circles.
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"Most people wouldn't recognize me on the street," says the 55-year-old Kusy, in his ever-affable, self-deprecating way. "But I have become kind of well-known in the folk art world."
I first met Kusy more than 20 years ago when his body of toothpick work included sculptures of the Titanic, built in 1985 (75,000 toothpicks and 9 feet, 8 inches in length); the Lusitania, built in 1994 (194,000 toothpicks and 16 feet long); and an 8-foot/16,000-toothpick version of the British clipper ship Cutty Sark (circa 1869), built in 1995.
His Titanic had been on exhibit at a River North gallery. Owner Celeste Sotola said, at the time, "Wayne is in the truest sense an artist because he's a loner, he doesn't follow anyone else's lead, and the amount of time he spends on his art is a real symbol of his dedication."
It was Sotola who introduced Kusy to Yolanda Saul, the director of the short-lived Chicago Center for Self-Taught Art Museum, who asked him to participate in the museum's first exhibition here in 1994. "The first time I saw the Titanic I thought it was amazing," Saul said. "I feel honored that he has agreed to loan us his work for the show."
At the time, Kusy said, "What I do is never boring." He was already at work with 1 million toothpicks and a lot of glue building the Queen Mary, an astonishing 25-foot-long, 3-foot-wide, 6-foot-tall sculpture. He finally finished that in 2011 and has since seen his work exhibited locally and nationally; it's been featured in hundreds of international newspapers and magazines and television programs. He still says, "What I do is never boring."
And now comes the "launch," so to speak, of the SS America.
It is scheduled to take place at 7 p.m. Friday at the Black Couch Gallery, 4200 W. Diversey Parkway, a former Hammond Organ Factory now converted into artist/business spaces. The ship will remain on display through the month (www.waynekusy.com, www.theblackcouchstudio.com).
It was transported to the gallery from Kusy's apartment, two large pieces carried by him and some pals. The bisection was not only to make it easier to manage the six flights of stairs down from his third-floor digs but also to allow for the ship to be displayed in two halves to give gallerygoers the opportunity to see the intricate interiors of the ship/sculpture.
There is a certain coincidence involved with this debut, because Friday, April 15, is the same day in 1912 that the Titanic went down in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.
Kusy has created his art in the apartments in which he has lived in Rogers Park and now Logan Square. He works on weekends and most weeknights for a couple of hours after getting home from work in Bedford Park as a Web designer/programmer for Sebis Direct, a document management firm.
He was born in New Mexico and grew up mostly in Rogers Park. He studied marketing at Loyola University and later Web design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. But his passion for boats began long before the necessity of pursuing higher education or a moneymaking career.
As a kid he played with Legos. In grammar school, he created a few items from Popsicle sticks, and in sixth grade came his first ship, a relatively modest affair that used 3,000 toothpicks, give or take. "Ships fascinated me," he says. "It was their incredible size. When you think about it, they are actually buildings that float. I wanted to know, 'How do they do that?'"
To answer that question, he has turned himself into a historian. His ships are built with the aid of deck plans, blueprints and mechanical drawings; also photos and, when available, videos of the real ship. The Internet has been of considerable help in these efforts.
He is, of course, a self-taught artist. There are no classes in toothpick art at the School of the Art Institute. No how-to manuals. No learned mentors. Over the decades he has become adept at making toothpicks do what he needs them to do by trial and error; now he is expertly able to use pliers to crush the toothpicks into more pliable forms.
He is not in this for the money. He has sold only one of his creations, the Titanic, purchased a few years ago for $15,000 by a Los Angeles museum that has since gone out of business. It now sits in the Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Naples, Fla. His Lusitania rests in the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, and his Queen Mary is in the National Museum of Ship Models and Sea History in Sadorus, a small Illinois town south of Champaign. At home, he keeps his 4-foot and 8-foot sculptures of the Cutty Sark. One of his ships, another Cutty Sark, is missing. "It was still a work in progress when I gave it to a carpenter in exchange for building me cases for ships," Kusy says. "That was about 20 years ago. He and the whereabouts of that ship are unknown."
Now, it would be foolish to think of Kusy's creations as mere novelties. By any definition, they are art and they are beautiful and they are fun, and he is going to continue making them. His next will be a sculpture of the SS Bremen, a German ship built in 1928.
He also channels his creative energy into music. He used to publish a magazine about the local music scene called FreeFest and was once a guitar-playing member of the band Heavy Mental. "I am between bands right now," he says. "But I will still go out and play some open mics at clubs. And I'm still single ... but who knows what the future will bring?"
He estimates that he will finish his SS Bremen in, "Oh, I don't know ... three, maybe four years."
"After Hours With Rick Kogan" airs 9 to 11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
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