October 14, 2004 – May 2, 2005
Chicago Architecture Foundation
Karen Johnson Boyd, philanthropist.
Photographed at Wingspread, Racine
Karen Johnson Boyd
Karen Johnson Boyd has made it her philanthropic endeavor to elevate contemporary craft to the status of high art. She opened the Perimeter Gallery in Chicago to showcase the work of craft artists and has donated hundreds of pieces to the Racine Art Museum. Johnson Boyd comes from a long line of artists and art appreciators. Her great-grandfather was a wood engraver in Norway. Her grandfather was the founding head of the Cornell University art department and a painter who often invited the grandchildren to his studio. Johnson Boyd's father, Herbert F. Johnson, Jr., was responsible for two of Frank Lloyd Wright's most important commissions: the S.C. Johnson Administration Building and Wingspread, the house where Karen Johnson Boyd grew up. Johnson Boyd remembers the story of how Wright came to design in Racine.
My father wanted to build a new administration building downtown for the Johnson Company. He called a local architect and asked him to do a sketch. The drawing looked like something from 1891, with sculptures on the outside and a little bit of Greek something or other, and my father just didn't make a connection at all. So my father asked the Johnson Company architect what he thought, and he suggested Frank Lloyd Wright. My father didn't know anything about Frank Lloyd Wright. No one could believe that he didn't know who Wright was, given that he was the most famous architect in the world at the time. I was away at boarding school, and my father came down to see me every Sunday to take me home for the day. One day in the car he said, "Karen, we are thinking of having a new building built. You are studying art history. Who is the most famous architect in the world?" I said, "Well, Frank Lloyd Wright." He practically ran the car off the curb. He always kidded with me about that.—Karen Johnson Boyd