Recently I took advantage of a long weekend to fly up to Chicago and spend some time with my sister-in-law Sarina. We covered quite a bit of ground in 4 days. I really loved the atmosphere of the city and was lucky that this late in the season there was such beautiful weather. It was in the mid-70's all weekend. Perfect for all the exploring that we did.
The first night I got in we made it down to experience the city's Second Friday Art night with galleries up and down South Halsted Street open. By far my favorite was Logsdon 1909 gallery and studio. They had an absolutely packed space with works ranging in mediums from ceramics to video installation.
The second day we slept in a bit, but then finally made it up and around to quite a few places. First stop was the Museum of Contemporary Photography. There was an exhibition of pretty good photos from Dave Anderson, but what was really interesting to me was the combination of Anderson's exhibition with another exhibition of Farm Security Administration photographs.
We then walked across Michigan Ave and into Grant Park. They were setting up for a marathon that day, so we made our way through the maze of port-o-potties and fences looking for Buckingham Fountain. What we came across was a construction zone. Currently the fountain is being completely refurbished, including the landscaping surrounding it.
Next we came across 'the Bean' (Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate), grabbed a hot dog and just watched the other visitors interact with the reflective surfaces. It's really an endless source of fascinating photographs. We saw a myriad of brides and a great quiencera party. Her escorts had on pin striped suits with wallet chains and bright pink ties.
We continued on to the The Art Institute of Chicago to look around. It's quite large and really could take a whole day in itself to do the place justice. We picked a couple of topics to cover and followed the map to just those galleries and of course spent some time in the gift shop. They did have quite an impressive collection of art books for sale and I can never resist.
Next we hopped on the bus and took a fairly short ride to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Most of the galleries were under installation, it was getting late and they were setting up for a private event later that evening. However, we did get to see one floor of their permanent collection. There was a room full of Cindy Sherman photographs which was great to see and another gallery which I was quite impressed with was a collection of Bruce Nauman works. We spent some time investigating an installation of a plexi-glass maze with 4 video monitors facing into the maze, a projection of a rat finding it's way through the maze and a surveillance camera that intermittently spliced real-time images of the room with the video of the rat in the maze. Fascinating! Then we ended up in the museum store, where I found all kind of great things. Lucky for us the store was open an hour later than the galleries.
Since I am taking so long to compose this blog, I've decided to call this Part One...more to come.
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