Wright Auction

Beloved to family and friends, as well as the Chicago art and design community, Fern Moss Kalai—also known as Fern Simon—passed away on February 16, 2024. Yet her legacy as a passionate collector and a knowledgeable dealer lives on through the many people she touched plus the enduring influence of her longstanding retail boutique, Arts 220.

In many ways, Fern was born into her eventual vocation. Along with her twin brother, the acclaimed design expert, Murray Moss, and her late sister, Jean Moss, an award-winning Esquire portrait photographer, Fern was raised in an aesthetically focused atmosphere by her mother and father. “My parents had remarkable and prescient visual acumen,” Fern told Chicago Tribune Magazine in 2009, “and passed it on to us, so there must be a genetic component involved.” Her father was Merton Moss, an engineer who invented and manufactured X-ray machines. His “hard-core, ultra-modern industrial ideals” contrasted in a stimulating manner with the playful outlook of Fern's mother, Ann, in which the lively unruliness of art often prevailed over logical design imperatives.

If someone were to ask me did I know my twin sister Fern well, given we lived our adult lives in different cities, I would have to say I didn’t know, but I, like most everybody who knew her, suspected so, hoped so.

Certainly I knew her the longest. We grew up comfortably together in my mother’s womb and yet she was the one who left first, diving into the world headfirst, leaving me alone on March 29, 1949, for six minutes until I had to come looking for her, I’m sure inspired by a pre-natal excitement she triggered even then—as well as a curiosity and her faith that there was a world out there rich with the complimentary contradictions she so loved.

It was the first time and I believe the only time I lost her even for a moment. Until now.

But in following her for 75 years, I early on found evidence of her looking almost everywhere, in every direction, determined to find a signpost that one would find at a junction in the road, with a hundred different arrows pointing to “Modernism, German Expressionism, Brutalism, Abstraction, Giuseppe Napoli, Picasso, Maarten Baas, Portanier.”

Fern delighted in the richness of human artistry—Fern was looking for the best way to get lost, to wander further and further into unknown, or known but overlooked, ideas expressed in art and design by famous and unfamous creators.

Please understand: Fern Moss was not a Collector. She was a Guide, with an ever-blooming passion for art, a visceral connection to historic and diverse ways of thinking and to the unique ways artists expressed that thinking. Fern led the way for many of us into the human heart that she was able to unearth in art.