In Memoriam: Dominick Di Meo
July 23, 2024
It is with deep sadness that Corbett vs. Dempsey announces the death of artist Dominick Di Meo (1927-2024). A key figure in Chicago's postwar art scene, Di Meo was born in Niagara Falls, New York. Some of his youth was spent grappling with his childhood contraction of polio. An extensive period in a polio ward, where he was witness to difficult and traumatic situations, left Di Meo with an aura of fierce angst and fatalistic humor that he carried into his life as an artist, as a sort of existential challenge to remain humanistic and creative. His self-consciousness about his disability persisted throughout his life, but these experiences ultimately pushed him into the arts. In 2017, he told Hans Ulrich Obrist: "I went into the Crippled Children's Guild with polio. We were bound in plaster casts. I'm lying down, and there's a Christmas party, and they gave out free toys, right? And I was given a set of Tinkertoys. But I was having a lot of trouble, because this arm was in a cast and I couldn't put things together. One of the nurses or aides saw that and she immediately picked it all up and took it away. And that broke my heart. It was a challenge that I was working at, and by her taking it away, it did something to me."
In the 1940s, dividing his time between playing cornet and making art, Di Meo came to a fork in the road – jazz or painting. Choosing the path of visual art, he enrolled as an undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met many of his future friends and cohort, including Leon Golub, Ted Halkin, and Evelyn Statsinger. Golub, who was five years older than Di Meo, was an important early colleague and devoted supporter; they shared an apartment and swapped painting techniques, both of them impressed by work they encountered at the Field Museum and later by Jean Dubuffet's "Anticultural Positions" lecture at the Arts Club of Chicago. Di Meo attended University of Iowa, Iowa City, for grad school, where he worked with printmaker and holocaust-survivor Maurizio Lazansky, then a new professor at the university.
With the exception of a two-year stint in Italy, Di Meo spent the emergent part of his career in Chicago. His studio was something of a beacon for younger artists. Generous and by then older than most of them, Di Meo invited fellow artists in, broke bread with them, played chess, showed them what a functioning artist's workspace looked like. Lorri Gunn Wirsum remembers having tea at Dominick's studio and says that Dom was the only person with whom she recalls Karl Wirsum talking in depth about his own work. "I got a sense from Karl that these were important visits to an art world 'elder statesman,'" she says. Although not much of a self-promoter, Di Meo was engaged behind the scenes, helping Golub with his ferociously independent art shows under the Exhibition Momentum moniker, then working on the sprawling Phalanx group exhibitions at the Institute of Design and participating in conspiratorial meetings under John Miller's leadership that ultimately led to the foundation of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1967. Di Meo was committed to the anti-war movement, and he made skull-and-crossbones butcher's bibs and helped make banners for marches and protests against the war in Vietnam. In 1966, Di Meo's studio was the clearinghouse for Chicago works destined for the Peace Tower in Los Angeles, an anti-war collaborative art project initiated by his friend Irving Petlin and sculptor Mark di Suvero. Di Meo's work appeared in the collaborative Protest Papers portfolio in 1968, just before he left for New York.
Arriving in New York, Di Meo was fortunate to inherit a rent-controlled loft space in Soho from James Rosenquist, where he worked until only a few years ago. A large Di Meo painting had been exhibited in the 1967 Whitney Annual; he continued to have an active studio life and exhibited in several notable museum exhibitions in New York, especially a show of 22 new works at MoMA's P.S. 1 in 1982. Although he had exhibited frequently in Chicago at Fairweather Hardin Gallery, and his work was included in many of the city's greatest collections, where it resonated with interest in Dada and Surrealism, he had only sporadic gallery exhibitions in New York and generally found it a less hospitable context for what he was doing. In Chicago Di Meo was the subject of a solo exhibition, Visionary Garden, at DePaul Art Museum (2013). More recently in New York, Di Meo mounted a solo show at JTT Gallery (2017) and was part of a two-person exhibition with Ella Rose Flood at Simone Subal Gallery (2024).
CvsD began representing Dominick in 2007. He quickly became a core artist to the program and a very dear friend. Along with six solo shows at CvsD, including a joint exhibition with Thomas Dane Gallery in London (2013) and a solo booth presentation at Art Basel (2019), his work has been included in numerous CvsD group shows and art fair booths. Richard Born, John Corbett, Jim Dempsey, and Jessica Moss included Di Meo in Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago (Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, 2016), the first museum survey of the group of artists with whom he was initially associated. CvsD published four exhibition catalogs of Di Meo's work; the gallery's most recent show with him, Torsoscape, closed less than a month before he died.
Although he'd been talking about death and dying from the moment we met him, Dominick was seemingly indefatigable. Jim Dempsey, Emily Letourneau and I were fortunate to have visited him in his assisted living facility on the upper west side this last March. Closing in on his 98th birthday, Dominick's body was failing him, but he was sharp as a tack and as funny and self-deprecating as always. Truly the last of the primary artists associated with the Monster Roster, Dominick was a fount of information and a witty conversationalist who could appear a barnacle, but was in fact thoughtful and caring. As the son of one of his early colleagues puts it: "Dominick was a curmudgeon with a heart of gold. A huge heart of gold." We will miss that heart, that well of history, and the singular persona of Dominico Generoso Di Meo. Ciao, bello.
– John Corbett