She Lived Mostly Outdoors On The Streets Of Chicago, Selling Her Unique Art To People Of All Walks Of Life
There are many iconic women who made an impact on American cities, women who, without their presence, those cities wouldn’t be the same.
Lee Godie, a famous art figure from Chicago in the 1970s and 80s, was one of those women. She lived mostly outdoors, selling her art to people of all walks of life on the streets and often giving them a memorable experience with her eccentric personality.
Since her passing, some of Lee’s work has made it from the streets to museums.
Lee was extremely private when it came to talking about her personal life and upbringing, but she was said to have been born in Chicago in 1908 under the name Jamot Emily Godee. She was one of 11 siblings brought up in a Christian Scientist household.
Several stories have been told about what Lee did during her younger years. While she said she had ambitions to be a singer in a nightclub, it is rumored she was once a telephone operator and got married in 1933. She had three children with her husband, George Hathaway, but two tragically died of illness at a young age.
It’s said that Lee moved to Washington in the late 1940s and remarried but ran away from her second husband after they moved to his farm, where she felt trapped.
There was a chunk of time when Lee went ‘missing,’ and her story became fragmented. But in the late 1960s, as she entered her 60s, she reappeared in Chicago, claiming she was a French impressionist artist and would parade around the famous Art Institute of Chicago.
When Lee began selling her artwork on the streets of Chicago, many of her customers were students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who would buy them for $5 to $20.
She made drawings, watercolors, and paintings, creating art pieces on any material she could find, from traditional canvases to chunks of cardboard.
Oleg Podzorov – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
Lee was best known for her portraits, which were zany, often cartoonish, and sometimes a bit eerie. She’d drawn a lot of portraits of women but drew different kinds of people, like princes, waiters, and women who had a resemblance to Joan Crawford.
She was also known for posing for pictures in photobooths at the Greyhound bus station, which she’d go back and edit with her art materials, embellishing them with pens or sewing them into her canvases.
Lee lived mostly outdoors for around 25 years. When she wasn’t selling her artwork and having quirky interactions with her customers by singing them a song or offering them homemade snacks, she’d sleep on park benches and keep all her things, including her artwork and supplies, in rented lockers.
At one point in her art career, Lee met gallerist Carl Hammer and, through him, was given her first solo exhibition in 1991. She also became the subject of many magazine and newspaper articles, which was how her surviving daughter, with her first husband, Bonnie Blank, found her and reunited with her.
A few years later, as Lee began showing signs of dementia, she was moved into a nursing home. She passed away in 1994 at 85.
Although Lee’s artwork was primarily sold on the street, it can now be found in the permanent collection of some museums, including the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the Smithsonian.
There have been special exhibits put up dedicated to her work, as people of younger generations got to learn about her fascinating story and see her art. Lee was certainly a woman who knew how to make an impact, and she will always be an icon in the Chicago art world.
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