No fooling, the chicken industry thought I had potential. I worked at a very large Tyson’s chicken plant in Monett, Missouri, the summers after my senior year of high school and first year of college. I was on cleanup crew during my first stint, which sounds worse than it actually was. My job involved cleaning the scale room where they weighed packaged chicken. The only problem with that comparatively tidy duty was that I was issued a garden hose, while my friends who worked on the same crew and same shift had pressure hoses that could drop you with one blast from thirty feet away. Believe me, it happened.
It was after my second summer at Tyson’s, which I mostly spent on the Cut-Up line, that it was suggested I make a career of chicken processing. That summer I took on various roles from breaking down the legs of whole birds (chickens don’t naturally bend their drumsticks just before they die), to grading chicken necks, to one particularly bleak day on Live Dock. My two summers at Tyson’s were formative and illuminating. Everyone had me pegged as a college boy, and they were right, but they were kind to me as well. The man with whom I broke down chicken legs saw me struggling with jelly-wrists after about 25,000 birds on my first day and he gave me an unauthorized break. He folded up his chicken legs and mine for at least five or ten minutes. It saved me and I have never forgotten it.
Near the end of that second summer, a Line Manager in Cut-Up told me he wanted to promote me to Line Boy. It was a stepping-stone, he said, and you could make a good living at Tyson’s. I knew he was right and so did two of my closest friends, Greg and Kim, who stayed with the company for decades, and did quite well for themselves.
If you’ve never worked in a factory, it is hard to explain how much pure hilarity and joy gets shuttled down the line along with all those birds (in our case), how much empathy and camaraderie folks feel for one another, and the unmistakable flirtations—sometimes appropriate, sometimes not—that got expressed with a wink and a smile from three lines away. But factory work can be soul-crushing too, and I had other plans, anyway. I retired from the chicken industry in August 1976.
By the time I was nineteen years old, after my second year of college, I made up my mind not to go back to school. I was lost and confused and no longer sure if any kind of future was ever going to find me (I thought at the time that was how it worked). Greg and Kim told me there was a job waiting for me at Tyson’s if I wanted it and I had every intention of going to HR and claiming it. But before I could, my father interceded. He told me I couldn’t go through life not knowing how to do anything and that he was going to make some kind of carpenter out of me. At the time, he seemed skeptical but determined.
So, I became a carpenter (eventually), which made sense. Most of the men in my family were tradesmen of some kind, and I had been around constructions sites my whole life. On random Saturdays, my Pop brought me to jobs and while he got ahead of something, I picked up trash, swept sawdust, and tackled other duties requiring no skills whatsoever. But during all those Saturdays, and there were quite a few of them, I had not learned a thing. I was greener than green. And unlike in the chicken factory, where people extended a measure of pity to the hopelessly useless, on building sites you carry your weight or you don’t stick around for long.
I needed to stick around, but in addition to not knowing anything, I was also soft and lazy after two years of college. The experienced men on the job—concrete finishers, heavy equipment operators, framers, roofers, electricians, plumbers, tile setters, cabinetmakers, drywall hangers, painters, bricklayers, trim carpenters—were not only skilled, but efficient in the economy of work. Plus, I was the son of Bob Sharp, the greatest of them all, and I didn’t know how to do anything. How could that even be, they wondered (sometimes aloud)? I had to find a second, third, and fourth gear, and trust me, I did.
Until I started going to construction sites with my father every day, I did not know how much his colleagues admired his range and abilities, his steady leadership, his sense of shared mission, and his unwillingness to settle for anything less than excellence. I had not even known he was funny. To me, he was my no-nonsense father who privileged hard work over all other virtues. I never heard him say anything funny ever, that is until I went to work for him.
I wound up building houses with Pop for five years, and it changed my life. It transformed my relationship with my father, to be sure, but it also taught me the pleasures and rewards of being dedicated to something bigger than yourself. I seriously considered making a career of construction work. The daily labors of a carpenter are so brilliant and important, challenging and stimulating, abstract and literal, and creative and rooted in tradition, all at the same time. By year five when I stopped being a carpenter, I was a skilled craftsman. To this day, I could frame and trim your house. But there was something in me that felt incomplete, an emptiness that required adjustment. In 1982, with some trepidation, I retired from being a carpenter. But I retired knowing that I had skills I could call on if I needed to. I had my father to thank for that.
So, I went back to college and studied art history, a discipline that prepares you for almost nothing in the practical sense. And I did it willfully. I could have studied something else, but I never even considered it. To support myself, I repaired and refinished antique furniture and sold country pieces I had bought at farm auctions to fancy antique shops in the suburbs of Kansas City. In 1987, when I was twenty-nine years old, I finally completed my degree in art history. Two months later, I retired without hesitation from my shaggy corner of the antique business. I moved to Chicago to pursue a graduate education in art history.
The rest of the story you already know or likely do. I started working at the Art Institute of Chicago in January 1988, first as a volunteer, then as an intern, and then as a lightly compensated part-time researcher by about three or four months later. I was also a graduate assistant in the Department of the History of Architecture and Art at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and it paid me an even slimmer stipend. I was thoroughly exploited by two vast institutions, but I simply didn’t care. I loved them both and could not believe my good fortune to be in their employ. Nearly forty years later, I still can’t.
As it turned out, I loved one vast Chicago institution slightly more than the other, and you almost had to in those days. There was a curious rivalry and at times acrimony between academic and museum-based art historians in the 1980s that I never fully understood but observed firsthand. Thankfully, it’s very different now. While I had initially envisioned a career teaching art history to indifferent students in a community college somewhere, the experience of working with actual works of art—and amazing works of art at that—and with world-class curators at the Art Institute of Chicago was too attractive not to pursue with every fiber of my being. And so, that is what I have done at the Art Institute and elsewhere for almost four decades now, the last two as director of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens.
I knew this day would arrive eventually. All things must come to pass. Earlier this year, I informed the Executive Committee of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens Board of Trustees of my intention to retire sometime in the summer of 2027, just after my seventieth birthday. I asked to stay until my successor is found, and I pledged a smooth and seamless transition. We will all do our very best to make that happen.
My retirement plan is to spend a great deal more time with Erin Riordan (brace yourself ). The older I get, the more I crave her company. In our many years together, she has only known the part of me who tends to work most of the time. Erin knows how important the art museum project is to me, that I wanted to deliver at the highest level possible for the Dixon, and she has been my selfless helpmate in anything I have accomplished. The work meant everything to me, and she knew it. But now I want more time with Erin. I want to be her helpmate.
In retirement, I may dabble a little in other pursuits— carpentry, maybe, but only around the house, and writing, for sure. I still have things left to say about art and other subjects, and I need to get them down on paper sooner rather than later. Whatever the future holds, my lifetime of periodically retiring tells me that change is as possible as it is inevitable. These days when I think about working and not working, the latter finally seems…what? Desirable, maybe. Plausible, possibly. At the very least, I’m ready to give it a try.
Thank you for making Erin and me feel so welcome here. We wish you all the very best, and please take good care of the Dixon. It is a treasure.
Kevin Sharp
Linda W. and S. Herbert Rhea Director