CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Several Champaign-Urbana homes designed by local architects between the 1940s and 1990s were also made as settings for artistic performances and cultural conversations. An exhibition at Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign examines how four midcentury modern homes served as incubators for avant-garde culture in the community.
“Making Place for the Arts at Home: Performance and Midcentury Modern Architecture” opens Jan. 30 and is on view through July 12. The homes are the Margaret Erlanger House near Carle Park in Urbana, designed by architect Jack Baker for Erlanger, a longtime Illinois dance professor and a pioneer of dance education; Baker’s loft home and studio near downtown Champaign; and the homes of architect John Replinger and artist Dorothy Replinger in Urbana’s Yankee Ridge subdivision and architect A. Richard “Dick” Williams in west Champaign.
“Having a performance space in your house isn’t typical. It feels really specific to this university and community,” said landscape architecture department head David Hays, who is a co-curator of the exhibition along with KAM director Jon L. Seydl, Randall Biallas Professor of Historic Preservation and American Architectural History Kathryn Holliday and emeritus architecture professor and practicing architect Jeffery Poss.
People associated with the U. of I. used the homes for dance, music and theater performances, artistic production and other cultural activities. Many nationally known artists visited them over the years, and the architects were well-known regionally but not nationally. The curators hope the exhibition will bring more attention to their work, particularly the unique residential performance spaces, as well as raise awareness of the value of midcentury modern architecture and serve as a springboard for further research.
Champaign-Urbana residents have long been accustomed to seeing artistic endeavors in different kinds of locations, Hays said. Art exhibitions and performances were held in many campus buildings and in homes in the middle decades of the 20th century, beginning with the Festival of Contemporary Arts, a long-running event that debuted in 1948, before KAM or Krannert Center for the Performing Arts existed.
Japan House and the School of Music’s experimental music studio began in private residences the university had purchased. The New Verbal Workshop of the 1970s was created by a group of faculty members, students and local residents who gathered in a house each week to improvise and record “speechmusic,” Hays said. The exhibition includes recordings from the New Verbal Workshop, as well as photos, works of art and other materials from the University Archives, Japan House, Sousa Archives and family collections.
Each home is represented in the exhibition with models, plans and photographs, including those from a 2024 book that Poss co-authored with photographer Phillip Kalantzis-Cope documenting midcentury modern architecture in Central Illinois, including the work of Baker, Replinger and Williams.
The exhibition includes a video interview of dancers talking in the conversation pit in the Erlanger home about Erlanger and the performances she hosted there, and footage of a solo dance project performed at the house by Louie Miller, a dance student in the 1990s. Also on view is a metal sculpture made for Erlanger’s home by artist Shozo Sato, the founder of Japan House who first came to the U. of I. at the invitation of Erlanger.
“The building and what happened within it are so inherently tied to one another. It’s genuinely moving when you hear the dancers talk about it,” Seydl said.
Two homes built by Replinger are featured in the exhibition. The original 1953 home in which he and his wife raised their children is a stereotypical midcentury modern design, Holliday said. A home they built later in life, completed in the 1990s, is dominated by studio spaces rather than focusing primarily on family living. The exhibition includes a monumental weaving by Dot Replinger and notebooks with drawings and collages that informed her artistic work, Seydl said.
A series of drawings of the Williams home shows the evolution of the property.
“It is really fascinating to see how someone can buy a tree-filled site and start with a small idea but keep thinking about it as a larger entity as they go along and step by step realize it. It’s really a commitment to place,” said Poss, who often spent time with Williams at his home.
Baker’s loft and studio features both public and private spaces reached by separate entrances. It is now owned by an Illinois architecture alumnus and preservationist who hopes to maintain the public event space, Holliday said.
Her architecture students mapped other buildings in Champaign-Urbana designed by the architects in the exhibition from the 1950s to the 1990s. Their project illustrates both the university’s displacement of neighborhoods as it grew and bought adjacent homes when it needed more land, and the reinforcement of existing segregation when architect-designed new homes and neighborhoods were built on the cities’ south sides rather than on the north sides, where Black families devised alternative means to invest in their own neighborhoods, Holliday said. Architecture students built a website to collect and share stories from neighborhoods throughout the community, contributed to archival research and built models for the exhibition.
The Jan. 30 opening night includes a salon talk by the curators. Dance lecturer Anna Sapozhnikov will perform her work “Good House Keep,” inspired by midcentury modern spaces in the community, on May 1 at KAM.
KAM will host a day-long event on May 31 that begins with a panel discussion on historic preservation and midcentury modern architecture, which is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a ticketed tour of four homes.
Editor’s notes: To contact Jon L. Seydl, email jseydl@illinois.edu. To contact David Hays, email dlhays@illinois.edu. To contact Kathryn Holliday, email keh202@illinois.edu. To contact Jeffery Poss, email poss@illinois.edu.
