Best known for his sculptural sprites in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Midway Gardens project, Alfonso Iannelli was instrumental in bringing about the modernist design movement in Chicago. One of the masterpieces that emerged from his Park Ridge studio was a plaster bust of Abraham Lincoln that has charted a curious course in recent decades. After Iannelli’s death in 1965, the Kelmscott Gallery in Chicago acquired much of his estate. The bust then made its way from the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago and back to Iannelli’s studio, which was bought and transformed into the Iannelli Studios Heritage Center by the …
Read More »