Pictured: from left: Tom Friedman, Steven Criqui, Sammantha Bittman, Andy Warhol, Abigail Lane, Kota Ezawa, Anne Collier. 

Ceramics by Stanya Kahn, Melissa Weber, Matthew Metz, Xavier Toubes, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Aneta Regel, Pae White, Michale Kaysen, and Theaster Gates. 

By BIANCA BOVA

Photos by CGN

On a quiet corner in the Kenwood area of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood sits a gothic revival home built by Charles Sumner Frost for the president of the Union Stock Yards in 1909. It is every bit as stately and charming as its present day owners, Jay Dandy, the Collection Manager for the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, and his wife, the ceramicist Melissa Weber. The couple have called it home for over 20 years, raising four children–two sets of twins–there, while restoring much, and renovating where needed in the process. The house’s austere copper and tile roof and imposing gargoyle-laden facade belie the warm (if eccentric) environment the family has cultivated inside, at the heart of which lies a multi-faceted collection.

“I grew up in a household of American and English antiques,“ says Weber, “So there’s that element, things that I inherited from my family, which can be really bizarre next to this passion for mid-century furniture we have. Add to that that Jay came home one day and said, ‘Look what I got!’ and a taxidermy bear has been with us ever since. The bear wears a fez, and at Christmastime, it gets a Santa hat. Jay also acquired a full bear rug, and then that started a whole bunch of other smaller taxidermy things.”

Pictured: Vintage Stuffed Cinnamon Bear, circa 1940s. In doorway: Stephanie Brooks. Above doorway: George Nelson Clocks.

Add to all of this an extensive collection of George Nelson clocks (“I own about 80 or 90 of them, and have been collecting them for over 30 years,” notes Dandy), Michelin ephemera ranging from ashtrays to advertising statuettes, all featuring Bibendum, better known as the Michelin Man (and about which, Dandy remains somewhat sly, only conceding “I just think he’s really cool.”), and an uncommonly thoughtful collection of pop and contemporary art, ranging from Tom Wesselmann to Tom Friedman.

“I’ve been collecting for 40 years,” says Dandy, who was raised in Omaha, Nebraska, and has spent his adult life in Chicago, “I bought my first piece when I graduated from college. It was a Warhol print. I acquired it here in Chicago, from a friend of mine who was working at a gallery downtown that I don’t think is around anymore. I took all my graduation money and got a Soup Can. 

“Had I known better,” he adds with the wistful regret that seems specific to collectors, “I would have gotten a Marilyn.” This early lesson was to be followed by a more poignant one. 

Pictured left of fireplace mantle: Sammantha Bittman; on the right, a print by Andy Warhol.

“Not long after I acquired the Warhol print, I convinced my mother that we should be buying art together. This must have been about 1985, and I wasn’t about to just waltz into Leo Castelli at that point, I just didn’t have the nerve back then,” Dandy says, “It was around that time I met this really wonderful woman–I can’t remember how I met her–who was a private dealer, Judy Goldberg. She was in New York, and probably 20 years older than me, so she lived through the art world of the 1960s. She had a teeny, tiny little space at 1081 Madison Avenue where she did shows and she did a lot of resale, had a lot of secondary market work. We were friends for awhile–phone friends. We’d talk on the phone now and again, and when I had to have back surgery in 1988, I remember she bought me this book on Lord Duveen, this very old biography, which was great. So there was this Roy Lichtenstein print that I really, really, really, really wanted. It was $4,000–a lot of money considering, I think, I was making about $17,000 a year working in commercial advertising at that time. This is what I got my mother to say she’d split with me. The print was Melody Haunts My Reverie, the woman singing into the microphone. Well, I moved very slowly then, so it was taking me a while to get there in buying it. Then the May auctions happened–this was the late 1980s–and the market just went nuts. A Lichtenstein print that [had an estimate] of $4,000 bucks sold for $28,000 and I remember calling Judy the next day, and she said, ‘Jay, I can’t sell you [Melody Haunts My Reverie]. I’m sorry, but you understand I just can’t do that.’ It was a hard lesson, but it was a really good lesson. That experience motivated me, and I started buying more, being more deliberate in my interests and in collecting.” 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chicago was at the height of its authority in the art world, and Dandy took full advantage. 

“I started going to Randolph Street Gallery–the original location, out on West Washington or something, back then it felt like no-man’s-land. I remember going to Phyllis Kind, to Young-Hoffman, to van Straaten, and Ten In One in Wicker Park. Feature was a great Chicago gallery, but I never went or met Hudson until after he moved operations to New York. I was actively going to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago as well. This is in the years before they built the current building they’re in, when it was ​​at [237 East] Ontario Street, in the old Playboy headquarters,” recalls Dandy, “Back then, Chicago felt a little more laid back. I remember one time, lighting Gerhardt Richter’s cigarette. We were smoking outside the museum and there was no one else around. I remember Dennis Hopper coming to an opening at the museum too, and he was just sort of with a couple girls, there wasn’t this mob of people or anything. Everything felt a bit more low-key in those days.”

Pictured: Stephanie Brooks (steel and enamel stars), Andy Warhol (silkscreen), Claes Oldenburg (sculpture on table), Drew Langlois (dolls).

Another view of the dining room

Dandy met Weber in the Autumn of 1989. 

“For our first date, Jay took me to go see the Martin Puryear show at the Art Institute,” Weber recalls. While the two come from disparate backgrounds, their shared appreciation for art and design laid the groundwork for both their relationship and their collection. 

“I grew up in New York City, and my mother was very involved with the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” says Weber, “Unlike Jay, who has always been interested in art, for me it was something that was more just always in the background. When I took art classes in grade school I certainly loved it, but I literally never took an art course in high school or college. Despite that, I knew I wanted to do something creative, so I decided I’d get a degree in interior design. I attended Parsons School of Design and received my Associate’s Degree, and then ended up in Cambridge, Massachusetts working for an architecture firm. I loved it, but after three or four years, I realized, ‘What I really love is materials.’ So I enrolled in a ceramics studio class at Harvard–it’s part of the school, but it’s also a community studio. One class is all it took. Eventually I quit interior design and I was just doing ceramics full time. When I married Jay and came out here to Chicago, I bought a kiln and found a studio, and I just learned as I went.”

Weber’s studio practice took a more serious turn when she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

“I began taking some classes at SAIC as a student at large, and then did a lot of workshops all over the country, all in functional ceramics. I didn’t learn how to draw, I never painted. I didn’t actually do any two dimensional work. When I learned at Harvard, I was throwing pots on the wheel, I never did any hand building. I really focused on functional work for probably 15 years.The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, all of those places were sort of my education, because I didn’t have a formal education in ceramics. Then around 2007 or 2008, I was just like–’I can’t make this stuff anymore. I can’t make decorative, functional work anymore. And I need help.’ So I applied to SAIC in the Ceramics Department for an MFA, and I got in, and then it just changed my life. I found the mentorship and the sort of critical education I was looking for there. At the same time, grad school was just pure fun for me. A lot of people go to grad school to teach, and I had no intention of teaching–which I ended up doing, but it got thrown at me, it was not something I had planned on. I went purely because I just could not make what I was making anymore, and I felt like I needed to really broaden my horizons. And it really did. Before grad school, I’d never had a critique, I’d never been expected to make any work for something. I had no context for sculpture. I had no context at all! I started from scratch in grad school. If you can imagine, I felt like a totally clean slate, which is kind of incredible. I mean, I had a very good eye. I certainly grew up in a very sophisticated New York City environment where there was a lot of art around me, and I had a background in interior design, but personally, I didn’t have any context for making anything other than a utilitarian object, though I have always been interested in how things are arranged and how things are put together.“

Weber has continued developing her practice since completing her Masters of Fine Arts, and now operates out of a private studio in the renovated coach house of her home. She continues to participate regularly in residency programs and exhibit her work. Her perspective and artistic development have, over the years, influenced and shaped the art collection that Dandy began before their meeting. 

“[Collecting] is much more fun to do with someone else,” he notes, “If I was solo, still single, I would have continued and collected stuff and–fine. I think when you start doing it with someone else, then there’s a difference. I usually don’t buy anything without telling Melissa, because that sort of takes the fun out of it. While we may not look at every single thing together and say, ‘should I get that, should I not get that, should I get that?’ The ‘hey–I really like this, what do you think?’ aspect is really enjoyable. We inform each other’s perspectives from our own experiences."

Pictured: Center: The Campbell’s Soup Company, The Souper Dress, 1966–67. 

Right, on wall: Various artists including works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, Joe Brainard, Fred Tomaselli, Laurie Simmons, and John Wesley. 

Dandy’s own professional career path in the art world was in some ways less direct. 

“After I lost out on the print from Judy Goldberg, I still really wanted a Lichtenstein, but I was interested in work from the mid-60s. He was doing work on lenticular plastic then, on this stuff called Rowlux. I love those pieces, and at the time when they showed up at auction, they were in pretty good shape. So I began going to the Christie’s and Sotheby’s auctions in New York back then, and just watching. The people you were bidding against in those days were mostly dealers. I remember starting to buy stuff, and paying this whopping 7% commission–7%, I know, that’s nothing now!–and then shipping it to Chicago, that way there’s no sales tax. In the mid-1990s I remember going to Christie’s East, which was then located in this really scummy building [on 67th Street] in Manhattan. There was Christie’s and Christie’s East, and all the junk was at Christie’s East. They had a Claes Oldenburg multiple of a wedding cake slice. Oldenburg had done it for somebody’s wedding and he made, I believe, ten cakes that are 18 slices each, and he stamped each one on the bottom. The one that was for auction at Christie’s East, the orientation of the stamp was upside down. I remember thinking, ‘Oh no, is this fake?’ I decided I should call the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. I had seen one of these works there before, and thought maybe I could find out what orientation their stamp was. So I called up the Wadsworth, and I got a hold of a then–junior curator named James Rondeau [now the President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago]. That was my first interaction with James. I had no idea five years later he would come to play a major role in my life.”

Dandy has a long history of philanthropy and support within Chicago’s museums.

“I started my involvement with the Art Institute as a member of the Auxiliary Board, which was the junior board at the time. It no longer exists. That was in the mid-1990s, and I did sort of everything on that board. Then I got involved with the Society for Contemporary Art around the time James came to the museum, in 1998. I served on the executive committee of the SCA’s board, and was president for a number of years. There was also a group at the MCA that I was in that doesn’t exist anymore, called the New Group,” he notes, “In 2007, James had said to me, ‘I’ve got a project, do you want to work on it with me? I’m going to do this Roy Lichtenstein retrospective,’ and he asked, ‘Would you like to volunteer to do the research?’ They did, of course, have other people who were researching, because it was co-organized with the Tate Modern in London. The managing director of Lichtenstein’s Studio was a friend of mine, though, so I actually had access. When James asked if I wanted to help, I said yes, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. But you find your your way, and you do it. Which I did for about five years.”

Pictured from left: Charles Spurrier, Tom Friedman, Jeanne Dunning, George Nelson Clocks for the Howard Miller Company, Zealand Michigan.

This long-term volunteer role is what led to Dandy’s joining the staff in the Museum’s Modern and Contemporary Art Department. 

“I started working at the Art Institute after the Lichtenstein show. I got hired as a part time researcher in the Modern and Contemporary Art department. I worked with James [then the department chair], predominantly, on whatever exhibition he was working on. Of course, because of my job, I did have to resign myself from all the committees and groups that I was in–it took me a minute to wrap my head around that. As a researcher, I always wanted more hours. Finally I was told, ‘You’re never going to get more hours as a part-time research person. If you want more hours, you have to take a full time job.’ And so I ended up applying for the Collection Manager role when it became available. I started in 2019 and still hold that position now. I made the transition while working on the Andy Warhol retrospective.” 

Dandy, as those in the know can tell you, is one of Chicago’s preeminent authorities on Warhol. His enthusiasm for the artist extends well beyond the masterworks of his heyday in the mid-1960s. On the uppermost floor of their home is what Dandy and Weber refer to affectionately as “the archive.” A modestly-sized space with a pitched ceiling, it houses Dandy’s vast and meticulously cataloged collection of Pop Art ephemera, along with one of the most extensive privately-held libraries of Warhol and Pop-related literature, and, naturally, his own papers. It is, more than any singular work in the collection or thoughtfully curated room in the house, the thing that defines Dandy as a collector’s collector. 

“All the records for our collection live up here in the archive,” Dandy says, “I’ve always been a pretty conscientious records-keeper–so many people don’t think that that’s also part of what you want to preserve, but it is! I remember many, many, many years ago going over to [art collector and philanthropist] Stefan Edlis’s home and walking into his library and being bowled over and saying, ‘I want that. I want to do this. I want to do something as cool as this one day.’ He was such a great collector, he documented everything, he was really a scholar of the works in his collection.”

“The first thing that started all of this for me really, was a book I bought in 1982 at the Strand in New York,” Dandy continues, “It was a book on pop art from 1965, and I opened it up, and oh my God, stuck in right there in the front was this opening invitation to a party at Warhol’s Factory for the launch of this book. I thought, ‘What the hell is this?’ I had no idea this stuff existed. Which almost immediately became, ‘How do you find this stuff?’ It was a little harder back then to track specific things down, but it was–not a smaller world, exactly–but just the art world, you start meeting people, and you start asking them questions, and they would say, ‘Oh, I know so and so, who has XYZ, you should call them up.” It was really fun, and frankly, they weren’t considered important by and large, the things I was after. It was things people just put in their files, just had laying around, didn’t really care that much about. Because I can’t afford to buy all the Warhols and Pop prints and works I’d like, this became another avenue, another way of collecting for me. I still add to it today.”

Views of a bedroom in the couple's home, featuring a mix of sculptural works, including a Blob Monster by Tony Tasset, as well as prints by Tom Wesselmann.

Indeed, collecting remains an active practice for the couple. 

“We buy a lot of Chicago artists,” notes Weber, “Jay’s love of Pop Art is certainly strong, but we still acquire all sorts of things, and if there’s another thread to it all, I think it’s that we have bought and continue to buy a lot of Chicago artists’ work.” 

“It’s just something that happened,” adds Dandy, “I don’t know that it was ever intentional, but I do enjoy acquiring works from people I have met–they don’t have to be my best friend–but it is nice when you know the artist somewhat. That’s been easy to do here in Chicago.” 

Easier still, it seems, when one takes into account how fully and uncommonly devoted the two have remained in their passion, enthusiasm, and support for the Chicago art world over the decades.

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One of Dandy's prized Bibendum figures.