The University of Chicago Magazine

A Chicago editor considers that question as important as the answer

Editor and art curator Anthony Elms, MFA’95, usually works with living artists. So it was a departure for him when he got a call to help sort through mountains of ephemera belonging to the colorful late band leader, street preacher, and experimental jazz musician Sun Ra, who spent his early career in Chicago.

Thinking outside the box: sketches for a Cosmic Research center.

“It’s actually the only historical thing I’ve done,” says Elms, the editor of WhiteWalls, a small press that specializes in publishing visual artists’ cross-disciplinary projects. “It was too good to pass up, but I can’t say I want to do too many more of them. I prefer the artist being alive.”

Mining the life’s work rescued from the trash heap has been a monumental task for Elms and art historian John Corbett, and one worth the trouble: Ra and his crew’s Bible-meets-sci-fi religious broadsheets, playful album-cover art, and dashed-off notes generated two shows in 2006 at the Hyde Park Art Center, a symposium, and three books from Elms’s press. The books include a collection of the broadsheets, The Wisdom of Sun Ra, and an exhibit catalog, Pathways to Unknown Worlds, both released in 2006, and a collection of essays, Traveling the Spaceways, released this fall.

“We’re still sorting through it,” Elms says, describing “the many, many boxes that just said ‘One of Everything.’” The one-of-a-kind items included annotated books, ancient mystical texts that had been annotated by Ra. ... There were photographs from trips, there was a little bit of everything—including a lot of junk.

“Even after the show, as we were going through things, we were discovering, ‘Oh my gosh, here are things we didn’t notice the first time.’ Personal letters and stuff. To say it’s organized would be lying. It’s jumbles of boxes.”

A collection of some 900 artists’ books, lovingly stashed in unbroken gray rows of archival boxes, fill a tall bookshelf in his Logan Square house, reflecting an interest that began while Elms was in graduate school, where he painted mostly still lifes, avidly read artists’ books, and wrote on the side. Visual-arts professor Robert Peters and Critical Inquiry editor W. J. T. Mitchell, he says, “opened me up to the idea that a text doesn’t have to result in an answer. But working through a process and working through a question can be fruitful, if you can fairly present that questioning process of looking at a text or an object and trying to decide what it might be.”

Peters’s wife, Sarah, a board member of WhiteWalls—a 29-year-old journal of artists’ writings founded by Buzz Spector, MFA’78—recruited Elms to join the publication’s editorial board. In 1999 the editorship opened up, and Elms was offered the job. Once he took the helm, he changed WhiteWalls from a triennial journal to a small press publisher of artists’ books.

He made the shift for two reasons, he says: “Independent magazine distribution crumbled, and being a small journal was starting to crush us—just trying to figure out how to distribute copies in an economical manner.” It was also difficult to meet artists’ desires: “They would say, ‘Can I do this with my pages?’ And we’d have to say, ‘No, it’s a magazine, this is the format, everything has to be the same size.’”

But distribution continued to pose a problem. “I was getting really tired of standing at the post office with, like, 36 boxes and waiting in line and doing this all by myself on a weekly or biweekly basis.”

Enter University of Chicago Press editor Susan Bielstein. She’d noticed WhiteWalls’s transformation, and after a series of meetings, the press agreed to distribute and do general marketing for WhiteWalls books. “It helps us a lot,” says Elms. “They’ve been dreams to work with. We give them the books and they try to make sense out of the crazy materials that I give them.”

Among those “crazy materials” is a collection of photographs of prisoners’ inventions by an incarcerated artist named Angelo, an artist’s book by painter Scott Short, and text-based work by then Chicago-based conceptual artist Helen Mirra.

Assistant curator at University of Illinois at Chicago’s Gallery 400, Elms also writes essays and reviews for such magazines as Artpapers, Art Forum, and Modern Painter. All of his jobs, he says, “are excuses to work with artists. If I’m writing an essay about someone, I can ask them questions and talk back and forth. If I’m curating a show, it gives me a great excuse to spend several hours with them and pull out some works we both think are good and try and figure out how to make sense of them.”