Bob Clark Beyond: Inspiration

latest inspiration posts

February's Featured Artist: Theaster Gates

My great friend, Theaster Gates, is a visual artist and urban planner who describes himself as “equal parts artist, bureaucrat, and hustler.” As an artist, Gates creates multimedia projects, installations, and performance art that confront issues of social justice, racial inequality, and poverty in the United States.

January's Featured Architect: Mario Botta

Two architects that altered the way I think about design and buildings are Eero Saarinen and Mario Botta. Both have a striking shift in the paradigm of what buildings can do to change the very way we think about our everyday surroundings. Botta was born in Switzerland in 1943 and attended a high school for the arts in Milan before going to study architecture at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia in Venice, graduating in 1969. While he was living in Venice, he had the opportunity to work for Louis Kahn Carlo Scarpa, and Le Corbusier, who influenced his work greatly. Shortly after finishing his studies, Botta founded his own practice in Mendrisio, Switzerland.

January's Featured Artist: Kerry James Marshall

Untitled (Pen), 1998. C-Print. Gallerist: Kavi Gupta, Chicago Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama before his family moved to South Central Los Angeles where he was raised in the Watts neighborhood—known for the riots in 1965 that were a response to police brutality. Marshall witnessed the riots and grew up surrounded by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s, which impacted him deeply and shaped his perspective as an artist.

Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella

I recently reacquainted myself with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s book Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone. It is required reading for my senior team. Nadella sums up the book perfectly when he writes: “This is a book about transformation.” It is about the transformation that Microsoft is undergoing with Nadella at the helm, but it is also about how Nadella himself has been transformed in the process, and his philosophy that one of the most important human qualities is empathy. Empathy, Nadella insists, is at the heart of how companies, society, and individuals must transform. The book is written in three main sections: his early life and journey to Microsoft, the story of Microsoft’s transformation-in-progress, and his views on technology and the future. One thing I appreciate is that Nadella wanted to write the book now, while everything is happening, so that the reader can share in the story alongside him, rather than looking back in retrospect. He wants it to be a picture of the mess, not the final product. This is the reality of having a significant leadership role in a company — it is always a work in progress with many obstacles to overcome and things to improve. Nadella shows this magnificently. It’s also written in a way that is really simple to digest and tames the complexity of subjects like the cloud and artificial intelligence for the average person.

December's Featured Artist: Amoako Boafo

Teju, 2019. Oil on Canvas. Gallerist: Mariane Ibrahim, Chicago. Ghanian artist Amoako Boafo resides between Vienna, Austria, where he has lived since 2014, and Accra, Ghana where he was born in 1984. He never imagined that his childhood love for painting would turn into a career as an artist. After losing his father when he was very young, he was raised solely by his mother, who worked as a cook. As a child, he taught himself to paint at home while his mother was away at work.

December's Featured Architect: Jeanne Gang

Architect Jeanne Gang, who was named Time Magazine’s most influential architect in 2019, deserves recognition for both her incredible designs and her work in raising awareness about ecological issues in the industry. Gang hails from Belvedere, Illinois, and went on to study architecture at the University of Illinois followed by studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Like some of the most talented architects in the world, she worked with Rem Koolhaas at OMA in Rotterdam and then founded her own firm in Chicago—Studio Gang—in 1997. Gang has been designing award-winning cultural centers, public projects, and other buildings since she founded her firm. Some of her most unique works are Aqua Tower in Chicago, the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Mira in San Francisco, and The Writer’s Theater in Glencoe, Illinois. She is also designing the prestigious Global Terminal at Chicago O’Hare International Airport that Clayco, in partnership with AECOM, is helping to build; it is truly a thing to behold. It is important to Gang to design places that connect people with their environment and she is inspired by ecological systems, both in her design as well as her building techniques. She is also active in research and exhibitions that raise public awareness about ecologically-friendly practices and closing the gender wage gap in architecture and design. Gang believes that cities and buildings can coexist with nature in sustainable and sensitive ways. Her activism, as it relates to architecture, stems from her belief that architecture is not just a “wondrous object,” but a “catalyst for change.” She calls this “actionable idealism.”

Inspiration

I have always had an insatiable curiosity

What causes me to get out of bed every morning is driven by inspiration. Ever since I was a little boy, I was inspired by my insatiable curiosity, which caused me to be a reader, a thinker, and a dreamer.

I can remember being inspired by seeing Bobby Kennedy on TV and watching videotapes of Martin Luther King Jr., and being deeply saddened by their assassination even though I was only 10 years old when I experienced all of this.

As a little boy, rocket flight was a big thing. I remember being fascinated by the moon and the stars and the astronauts exploring them.As humans we are achieving remarkable things that only a handful of years before were just in the imagination.