When John Preus MFA'05, multidisciplinary artist, designer, and furniture maker, talks about his current project for the Keller Center, he reveals a deep and thoughtful relationship with hundreds of desks, chairs, tables, and bookshelves that became raw material for his art after he retrieved them from Chicago Public Schools that were closed in 2013.
Preus – whose name rhymes with “choice” – has fashioned wood objects and sculpture out of hundreds of pieces of furniture he reclaimed from some of the 49 elementary schools that were closed, a controversial move halfway through the tenure of Mayor Rahm Emanuel that drew the ire of the Chicago Teachers Union, to say nothing of many community parents. A phone call in 2014 conveyed the urgency of removing the pieces, with their patina of use by generations of CPS students, primarily students of color on Chicago’s South and West Sides, who left their mark with initials, images, and other expressions of imagination and aspirations, boredom and frustration, carved into the wood.
