Kathy Kozan puts down her cigarette and picks up a sponge and starts slapping the wall with it. Dust and paint particles fly in her face, and she shouts instructions to her workers over the din of Public Image Ltd. Construction workers sand pieces of wood, and sparks fly from a blowtorch up above. Artists are painting musical instruments on the lavender walls, and some guy is sitting below the scaffolding, eating his tuna-fish sandwich out of a Muppets lunch box.
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It’s around noon in what will soon be the Excalibur nightclub, the site of the old Limelight at Dearborn and Ontario. Through the fog of dust and cigarette smoke the place looks like a Levi’s 501 commercial: good-looking kids in paint-splattered jeans sprawled atop scaffolding, sharing jokes and paintbrushes. At age 37, Kozan is the oldest.
Kozan says she has studied at 13 colleges and has taught art at Gordon Tech. Although she’s in charge of 20 artists, all of whom work for Kozan Studios, she takes full part in putting her designs on the walls–scrambling up scaffolding and spraying paint all over the place with everyone else.
Kathy Kozan is drinking egg-drop soup with one hand and paging through a series of blueprints with the other. Her studio manager, Danielle Giudici, is going through a list of pop-song lyrics that will be painted on the walls to strike nostalgic chords in the baby boomers who will frequent this place. A guy who’s studying the acoustics is clapping his hand loudly and yelling “Hello? Hello?” Clap, clap, clap.
Yet after she began work on the project, plenty of people started to pitch in and help. “You get your credibility by doing it,” she says.
