Jan Cicero Gallery

Jan Cicero has often described her career as a gallerist as "an accidental" one. in 1959, teaching Physical Education and Dance for six years, and having two children, Erica and Caroline (in 1965 and 1970), all of which sidelined an interest in art piqued when a high school teacher introduced her to Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism. Some of these artists had banded together in solidarity (e.g., "The Five," In 1974, Cicero decided to try to remedy the situation. She hung the work of a second abstract group—the self-dubbed "Artists Anonymous," which included Carol Diehl, Mary Jo Marks, Tony Giliberto, Frank Pannier and Postiglione—on the empty walls of her large, newly purchased Evanston home and held an opening. At the time, the city's art scene was beginning to expand beyond being what Franz Schulze deemed "a one-corner art town," with alternative galleries, such as N.A.M.E., Artemisia and A.R.C. having opened around the corner on Hubbard Street to avoid the high rents of the established Michigan Avenue/Ontario Street gallery district. ==Work and artists exhibited==

Throughout its operation, Jan Cicero Gallery was known for showing work that was underrepresented or under-appreciated. Mary Jo Marks, and Corey Postiglione, and sculptors Virginio Ferrari as well as more gestural or lyrical work from Carol Diehl, and the Art Institute of Chicago. That experience encouraged Cicero to open a full-fledged gallery. Barbara Grad, Bonnie Hartenstein, and Dannielle Tegeder, Barbara Blades, geometric painter James Juszczyk Karen Kunc, Richard Loving, Peter Plagens, and cityscape painters William Kohn and Ernest Viveiros. Others, like landscape painters James Cook, Peter Holbrook, Merrill Mahaffey, DeAnn Melton, Diane Lucille Meyer (then known as Diane Meyer Melton), and Theodore Waddell, Exhibits that the gallery put up in a representational vein included the landscape surveys "Out West" (1989) and "Urban Sites" (1991), and the still life show, "Immovable Object" (1998). Kay WalkingStick and Emmi Whitehorse. The gallery also presented a late-career show for painter Constance Teander Cohen (her first major exhibition, in 1983), and a retrospective of her work a decade later, alongside paintings by her husband, George Cohen. Other late-career artists included semi-abstract painter Eleanor Himmelfarb (1985), and Theodore Halkin, another former Monster Roster/Imagist. Beginning in 1982, the gallery mounted four solo exhibitions of Halkin, who had reemerged after a period of inactivity with a new impressionistic style quite different from his earlier mythic, expressionistic work. ==Closing==

On January 31, 2003, Cicero closed the gallery in order to focus on her family. She continued to represent artists privately and to work as a curator and art consultant. == References ==