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Artist Barbara Koenen at Design Museum of Chicago with some of the broken clocks and watches she has collected.
CHICAGO - When Barbara Koenen describes her revelation, you picture time slowing, time stopping, time pausing on its unending march to oblivion. You imagine a young woman in Chicago struck suddenly with a single overwhelming sense of purpose and mission: She must collect broken clocks.
Every broken clock that comes her way, she must have.
She had a great idea.
This was back in 1989, years ago. Like 17.7 million minutes ago. Back then, Koenen — now a longtime Chicago artist and executive director of the Creative Chicago Reuse Exchange — was a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute. She was listening to a lecturer when he repeated a familiar saying: Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Koenen, incredibly, had never heard this. The point fascinated her.
It didn’t stop fascinating her.
The other day, decades later, she stood in the Design Museum of Chicago in the Loop, which is now showing the 800 broken clocks she’s collected since 1989. Her goal then — her great idea — was to gather so many clocks, stopped at so many different times, she would have a broken clock representing every minute of 24 hours. Or 1,440 clocks.
Unfortunately, the 800 broken clocks represent only about 13 hours.
Eventually, she may even have all the time in the world.
The Design Museum’s exhibition of her clocks — recently extended to Oct. 17, and ironically titled “The Correct Time” — has been a chance for strangers and friends (and Design Museum founder Tanner Woodford) to bring her even more broken clocks. Since the show opened last summer, Koenen has been gifted 100 additional broken clocks.
OK, so right about now you’re either all in on this and think it’s incredible, clever and profound, or you’re screaming that Koenen needs another hobby. For instance, her husband, former Chicago city historian Tim Samuelson, collects player-piano rolls, jazz records, lost building décor. That you get. But as Koenen explained, her clock project was conceived in absurdity. Should you need a little more background, a basic why, she continues: “I suppose it’s a metaphor, for the drive of humanity to try to create a system or mechanism to capture and quantify nature and forces that are larger than ourselves.”
On the other hand, she also thinks it’s just kind of hilarious that “somewhere on these walls, any time of the day, will be the correct time. You will have to find it, but it’s there.”
Time, of course, is among an artist’s blue-chip subjects.
It’s grander than a bowl of fruit or languid Sunday in the park — though even with those, time is partly of the essence. Koenen’s broken clocks — half conceptual extravaganza, half stunt — is maybe closest in practice to another clock spectacular: Swiss American artist Christian Marclay’s 2010 opus “The Clock,” a 24-hour-long film composed of 12,000 film clips showing clocks at various times of the day, edited and projected so that the time on-screen corresponds to the time in real life. There is also Author Clock, designed by engineers in Chicago who raised $1.3 million on Kickstarter this year; it’s a digital clock that tells time using quotes from books, each one including a different minute of the day.
Stopped timepieces collected by artist Barbara Koenen seen on display at Design Museum of Chicago.
The Design Museum, playing off Koenen’s collection, slipped an Earth Clock into the show, a digital, online clock using Google Earth images of landscapes that resemble numbers. Art about the march of time tends toward austere meditations on impermanence and age — Koenen said her own art is often about “the ultimate futility of anything we do at all” — but works like the broken clock collection and Marclay’s “Clock” attempt to hold time in place, assign it an image. You might even say the same of your friend who compulsively posts on Instagram all morning, afternoon, late into the night.
All are trying to wrestle the hour, the minute, the second, to the ground — stay!
But Koenen, in 1989, had few art-world precedents to reference, and no internet to solicit broken clocks. She posted flyers on telephone poles and handed out business cards explaining her project. She mailed press releases asking reporters to ask their readers to donate broken clocks. She went on radio shows at three in the morning. She asked friends, family and colleagues. She went to the Mallers Building, which houses dozens of jewelers in the Loop, and “introduced myself to the watch repair people, so they opened a drawer of unrepairable watches. They thought I was weird.” Since this was at the time a fellow student, the Chicago artist known as Dread Scott, made national headlines with an exhibition that seemed to ask viewers to step on a United States flag, boxes of broken clocks mailed to Koenen at SAIC were sometimes mistaken for bombs.
“This was one of those clocks,” Koenen said, bending down in the Design Museum gallery to show an elaborate, two-level clock constructed of popsicle sticks. Conversely, nearby was a clock the size of a fingernail, so tiny one could only assume it stopped.
Koenen gathered so many clocks that she began to keep a ledger of who donated and the time that each clock stopped. Jeanne Broussard’s stopped at exactly 6:00. Tony Phillips’ stopped at 7:51. The late Chicago artist Ray Yoshida’s clock stopped at 3:32.
The exhibition includes everything she’s collected, plus every clock donated in the past several weeks. Some look ready to start again, some look very broken. Some are scratched, some are missing everything but their slight resemblance to a clock.
There is a long row of wristwatches, a bunch of cuckoo clocks, a grandfather clock, old flip-number bedside clocks, marble clocks, wooden clocks, plastic clocks, glass clocks, handmade clocks, industrial clocks, foldable travel clocks, clocks that look like the clock your grandmother owned for 60 years, clocks shaped like airplane propellers and toilet seats. Schlitz promo clocks and a drug manufacturer’s freebie clock that for some reason shows the face of Sigmund Freud. Clocks featuring Charlie the StarKist tuna and Mickey Mouse and the Joker and a fish-theme clock that once bubbled on the hour.
When she started the project, she would routinely adjust the times to fill in the minutes she hadn’t yet collected. “We can play around with time until we get it right,” Koenen said. But over the decades, she has been more likely to leave the clocks as they are; which means, she has a handful of duplicates.
Paired with the clocks are an assortment of letters written by their donors, often touching memories of long-ago lives. The clock donated by an Irish immigrant. The clock that traveled with its owner around the world. The clock that kept watch over a family’s holidays, arguments and dinners for decades. Many mark an owner’s transition to adulthood: “My first serious watch bought for my first serious job at the Chicago firefighter’s union.” Almost every watch she has “came with a great story,” Koenen said.
As part of the show, the Design Museum invited artists to create new clock faces; there is also a smatter of Chicago clock history, and recently included, remarkably, the original wooden hands from the Wrigley Building’s clock face, located by Samuelson on eBay.
But Koenen — whose history of conceptual art includes hand grenades nuzzled in knitted cosies, a gumdrop tree in Skokie and Afghan-inspired war rugs made of spices — dominates through sheer volume. The problem is, when the show ends, these 800 broken clocks need a new home. Koenen no longer wants to keep 800 broken clocks in her studio. Go figure. She’s been wondering if someone in Chicago would give them a permanent artful installation. A CTA station would be perfect, she said.
After all, time, like the Blue Line and the 147 bus, waits for no man.
The origin stories of delicious creations are often contested, and the whoopie pie is no exception.
Pennsylvania and Maine are just two of the locations that lay claim to the chocolate cake-like cookie sandwiches filled with cream. Amish cooks came up with them, Pennsylvania says, while Maine says they were first sold at Labadie's Bakery in Lewiston in the 1920s.
Maine took things one step further by making the whoopie pie the official state "treat" in 2011. (Not to be confused with the state dessert, which is blueberry pie).
Alabama's got a state dessert, too: Lane cake. The star of this layer cake is the filling — a buttery, bourbon- or brandy-spiked raisin mixture that sometimes includes pecans and coconut.
Emma Rylander Lane of Clayton, Alabama, is credited as the cake's creator and namesake, and the recipe appeared in her 1898 "Some Good Things to Eat" cookbook. The Southern sweet also makes it into the pages of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird."
Named for Marion County, Oregon, the marionberry is a cross between Chehalem and Olallie blackberries. The berry was introduced in 1956, according to the Oregon Raspberry & Blackberry Commission. The marionberry has "a tart, earthy sweetness," the commission says, "perfect for eating fresh."
They're also very good in pies, and come July, bakeries are brimming with berries baked into rich, buttery crusts. Lauretta Jean's Pie Bakery in Portland makes the most of the short but sweet marionberry season.
Flickr via Chelsea Nesvig
The iconic key lime pie's origins have been called into question in recent years, and Floridians aren't happy about it. But the pie certainly has strong ties to Florida, and it's the official state pie. (Still, strawberry shortcake's recent designation as state dessert was met with consternation from some key lime pie lovers).
Small, tart, yellowish key limes were once grown commercially in the Florida Keys, and the pie is Key West's signature dish. Britannica's online entry about the pie suggests that these days imported limes or bottled juice are used in many pies. Typically, a graham cracker crust is filled with a tart custard made with plenty of juice and sweetened condensed milk.
St. Louis gooey butter cake is thought to be the result of a happy accident of proportions in the 1930s.
Although not Missouri's state dessert (that would be the ice cream cone, which has ties to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair), the dense, flat cake with a gooey center is for sale all over St. Louis — in classic form or with a twist such as lemon or butter pecan flavor. It's often dusted with powdered sugar.
Shave ice came to Hawaii via sugar plantation workers from Japan, where kakigori had been a popular sweet dessert for centuries. Soft flakes of ice shaved from a solid block soak up the sweet syrup of your choice.
Matsumoto Shave Ice, established in 1951 on Oahu's North Shore, has been serving the refreshing treat to generations of locals and visitors. Lilikoi (passion fruit) and pickled mango are on the tropical end of a flavor spectrum that includes raspberry and bubblegum. Condensed milk, vanilla ice cream and azuki beans are among the available add-ons.
Legal battles have been fought over a delicious chocolate walnut pie from Kentucky. Kern's Kitchen in Louisville says there's only one such pie, first created in 1954, and it has a registered trademark on "Derby-Pie®."
The business is very serious about it.
"Protecting our trademark means protecting our reputation and the integrity of our product. So although we prefer to settle differences amicably, we will resort to litigation if necessary," Kern's Kitchen's website says. But the Louisville Courier-Journal prevailed in 2021 in a trademark dispute over the use of the words "derby pie" in a recipe and article in the newspaper. A pie worth fighting for? Taste it and see.
This coffee cake makes a delicious holiday brunch treat or a sweet coffee accompaniment any time of day. The cake has roots in Moravian Church settlements in North Carolina and Pennsylvania dating back hundreds of years.
In North Carolina, Dewey's Bakery in Winston-Salem has been baking the buttery cakes since 1930. Winston-Salem is also touted as the production epicenter of the incredibly thin Moravian cookie, which features molasses, cloves and ginger in its most traditional form.
Peanut butter and chocolate with no baking necessary. What's not to love? This candy hails from the Buckeye State, a nickname that originates from a tree with nuts that resemble the eye of a deer.
The story goes that the bite-sized sweets, where all but the top of the peanut butter ball is covered in a layer of dark chocolate, were created in the 1960s by Ohio resident Gail Tabor.
They were shared at Ohio State-Michigan football games, and their simple goodness eventually spread well beyond the state.
"A pie in cake's clothing." That's how Yankee Magazine described the Boston cream pie, which involves sweet pastry cream sandwiched between two rounds of golden cake, finished with a smooth chocolate glaze.
This pie impostor seems to have originated at Boston's Parker House Hotel, now Omni Parker House, which opened in 1855. Boston cream pie is the state dessert of Massachusetts. (The state doughnut? Yup, Boston cream.) Why it's called a pie is still very much a mystery.
This banana dish involving butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, rum and banana liqueur — and set on fire tableside and served over vanilla ice cream — was dreamed up at Brennan's Restaurant in New Orleans. It was for a 1951 dinner honoring Richard Foster, chairman of the New Orleans Crime Commission, according to The Times-Picayune newspaper.
At Brennan's, it's offered at breakfast, lunch and dinner and is the most-ordered item on the menu. Here's the recipe. Proceed with caution, flambé novices.
With up to 10 thin layers of yellow cake separated by fudge frosting, this cake originating on Maryland's Smith Island is thought to date back generations. Its designation as Maryland's official state dessert in 2008 brought national attention to the cake and its birthplace, a three-by-five mile island in the Chesapeake Bay where pretty much everything arrives by boat.
Today, two baking outfits, Smith Island Bakery and Smith Island Baking Company, ship different flavors of the cake all over the country.
The precise origins of the coconut cake are hard to pin down, but decadent layer cakes covered in shaved coconut have been associated with the South since the 1800s. Baker and author Anne Byrn told NPR that enslaved African cooks had knowledge of new ingredients such as coconut and produced some of the South's best cakes.
Here's a treasured family recipe from Cheryl Day of Back in the Day Bakery in Savannah, Georgia.
This anise-flavored cookie topped with cinnamon sugar was brought to New Mexico by early Spanish colonists. The biscochito has been the official state cookie since 1989, and by New Mexico's claim, the first in the nation to receive the designation. Frequently made with lard, the dough is rolled out thin and often cut into shapes. The cookies are a Christmas tradition and often appear at weddings and other celebrations.
Texas Monthly said it got a "sheet-load of letters" a few years ago about the best way to make this thin chocolate cake that's often associated with funerals and church events.
How it came to be associated with the state is still a mystery, although its size has been put forward as one possible reason. Often baked in a jelly-roll pan, the cake is expansive. Cocoa is the standout ingredient in both cake and frosting, with nuts mixed into the latter.
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Artist Barbara Koenen at Design Museum of Chicago with some of the broken clocks and watches she has collected.
Stopped timepieces collected by artist Barbara Koenen seen on display at Design Museum of Chicago.
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