Sabina Ott built a mountain.
Called the “Artist Mother of Chicago,” Ott knew how to bloom where she was planted, catalyzing and connecting the artists in her community. Along with the beloved Terrain Exhibitions she forged from the exterior of her Oak Park home, Ott championed her peers and students at Columbia College, all while using her own creative practices to envision impassioned exchanges between culture and nature. There were layers upon layers of humanity to her work.
After nearly four years of cancer treatment — during which she won a Guggenheim — Ott died early Tuesday morning at the age of 62, holding the hand of her husband, John Paulett.
“I was quickly smitten. She resisted for a while. She was smart, very smart. She was artistic. She always told people that we were the two most different people except in our values. We cared about justice, about community, about creativity, about kindness,” Paulett said in an email on Tuesday. “We were married for 12 years. At 10 years, we had a ceremony to renew our vows. We told each other, ‘I would marry you again.’”
The child of Jewish immigrants who landed in New York before settling in Los Angeles, Ott was born in 1955 and called herself “a coastal hybrid.” When asked about her teenage years out on the Pacific, Ott told online publication LVL3 that she “grew up in Los Angeles and spent a lot of time on drugs, at the beach and making drawings and sculptures.”
“Over the years, we cried and complained about so many bad dates and catastrophic love affairs — until we both got married and complained a bit less,” best friend Dana Berman Duff said in a written statement. “So many times, too many times, we had to pull each up from the doldrums of perceived professional neglect as artists. She was an artists’ artist.”
Her formal education was also distinctly Californian. After completing her BFA in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979, she then earned her MFA in Painting there in 1981. Upon mounting her first solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles in 1983, Ott went on to participate internationally in more than 100 solo and group shows.
“In the 1970s when she was an art student at SFAI, she and her friends ran a space called Jetwave, a site for art, punk music, parties and more,” art historian Karen Moss wrote in an email. “When she moved back to LA in the 1980s her new-image like diptychs of everyday objects elicited semiotic readings. This soon gave way to her obsession with Gertrude Stein’s poetry and her vibrant, multimedia experiments with ‘rose’ paintings and prints.”
With her 2005 move to Chicago to lead the Art and Design Department at Columbia, Ott experienced a shift in her work and began to focus primarily on the public possibilities of her projects. A practitioner of what her good friend Chris Kraus calls “radical localism,” Ott had the foresight and generosity to embark on projects that celebrated the here and now of Chicago’s art world.
This eventually resulted in the 2011 creation of Terrain Exhibitions, an ambitious curatorial project where Ott and Paulett invited artists to exhibit site-specific work from their front porch. Terrain eventually expanded to include a neighborhood-wide biennial that began in 2013, commingling Midwestern artists with those from around the world.
Her approach to people was as vast and welcoming as her approach to media; her loved ones say Ott was nonstop, exuding inimitable energy and conviction.
“Sabina was a feminist to the core: She championed women students, emerging, and established artists all. She gave us women to consider in her work, Gertrude Stein being her greatest love,” recalled Ott’s friend and Columbia College colleague Melissa Potter. “She made feminism a lust for life and magic moment. I loved that so deeply about her: committing to activism and knowledge through joy and a dream of a better view from a wild space.”
“Oh my, she championed and defended women! Sabina was happy and light and often frivolous — and she raged against bigotry and injustice,” continued Duff. “She was always all-in, 100 percent.”
“Sabina’s generosity, her love of connecting people, her desire to help other people see their creative dreams to fruition — that is the essence of Sabina,” said cultural critic and friend Alicia Eler. “She was generous to all, and above all she sought and, I think, achieved happiness. Maybe even enlightenment. She will definitely continue to be one of my guides in this lifetime.”
In Chicago, Ott was represented by Aspect/Ratio Gallery, led by Jefferson Godard.
“Sabina has given so much to so many. Her sense of community is remarkable and she strove to make people feel connected,” Godard wrote in an email. “Her legacy in Chicago (and beyond) has left an indelible mark as she touched the lives of countless artists as well as citizens of her own Oak Park community. This network that Sabina laid will only continue on, and I am honored to have been part of her orbit.”
According to a Facebook post written by her husband, “hundreds of people” filled Ott’s house a few weeks ago for a celebration of her life. “That was about the last day that she felt good,” he writes. “She appreciated all of the love that she felt that day.”
For Ott, the final curation was a visualization of a life well lived.
Ott is survived by husband John M. Paulett, her stepchild Kelly (Craig) Mitchell and grandchild Hannah Mitchell. She was the devoted daughter of the late Aaron and Rita Ott. Visitation will take place at 2 p.m. until time of service 6 p.m. Saturday, July 28, at Drechsler, Brown & Williams Funeral Home, 203 S. Marion St., Oak Park. Interment private.
In lieu of flowers, donations to Assata’s Daughters of Chicago (assatasdaughters.org) or Black Youth Project 100 (byp100.org) are appreciated.
khawbaker@tronc.com
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