The above images were taken at the Illinois Railway Museum on what may have been the last cool, breezy day in Summer 2016.
Category Archives: museums
Mental geography
The following images were taken during the Member Preview of the Art Institute’s “America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s,” which runs through September 18.
■ O. Louis Guglielmi’s “Phoenix (Portrait in the Desert: Lenin)” (1935)
■ Grant Wood’s “Death on Ridge Road” (1935)
■ O. Louis Guglielmi’s “Mental Geography” (1938)
At the Field Museum
China’s First Emperor and His Terracotta Warriors runs through January 8, 2017, at the Field Museum.
At the John G. Shedd Aquarium
“This time it’s just simply my bedroom…”
I took the images above at the Art Institute’s “Van Gogh’s Bedrooms” exhibit, which runs through May 10.
■ “Parisian Novels” (1887)
■ “A Pair of Shows” (1887)
■ A letter to Theo
■ An early sketch of the bedroom from a letter to Theo
■ “Self-Portrait” (1889)
■ “A Corner of the Asylum and the Garden with a Heavy, Sawed-Off Tree” (1889)
■ “Thatched-Roofed Cottages of Jorgus” (1890)
■ “Hospital at Saint-Rémy” (1889)
The Oriental Institute
First Folio
The Illinois stop for the First Folio! tour is not the Newberry Library, as one might have guessed, or any of Chicago’s wonderful museums or the state’s colleges or universities. No, “The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare” can be seen at the Lake County Discovery Museum through February 28. Opened to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, the Folio reposes in a display case, which is, in turn, behind a display pane. The effect is a bit like birdwatching through the picture window with binoculars: twice-removed. And while good reasons for the ultra dim lighting must exist, I have grown old: It was beyond difficult to see the Folio. I have, however, decided to focus on the fact that I stood in (approximately) the same room with the bible of the secular religion that is bardolatry, and that, dear readers, was wildly cool.
Field trip
For twenty years, I have mostly avoided visiting the museum campus during spring and winter breaks and summer camp days, but scheduling constraints dictated that the winter holiday was the most convenient time for an all-day visit. Oh, the noise, noise, NOISE! Still, the Field Museum is such an amazing place that I nearly put the pressing crowds out of mind, particularly when wandering exhibits like the Gidwitz Hall of Birds and the Cyrus Tang Hall of China. The following images were captured in “The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander the Great” and the Cyrus Tang Hall of China.
Milwaukee Art Museum
The images in this post were captured with my iPad. The above are details from
■ Yinka Shonibare’s “The Age of Enlightenment — Immanuel Kant” (2008)
■ Philippe de Champaigne’s “Moses Presenting the Tablets of the Law” (ca. 1648)
■ Roy Lichtenstein’s “Crying Girl” (1964)
■ ?
■ Paul Klee’s “Hot-Blooded Girl” (1938)
■ Anselm Kiefer’s “Midgard” (1982-85)
Yesterday we visited the Milwaukee Art Museum for the first time since its “grand reopening” following the expansion and redesign. My “discovery” this time was the mental juxtaposition of two St. Francis portraits separated by three centuries: Franciso de Zurbarán’s “Saint Francis of Assisi in His Tomb” (1630/34) and Préfète Duffaut’s “Sen Franswa” (1955).
Surreal
I captured these images as I wandered through the Museum of Contemporary Art exhibit “Surrealism: The Conjured Life” yesterday.
Detail from
■ Tom Czarnopys’ “Untitled” (1984)
■ Joseph Seigenthaler’s “The Couple” (1993)
■ June Leaf’s “But Alas, He was an artist”
■ Jimmie Durham’s “In a Cabin in the Woods” (2010)
■ Jean Dubuffet’s “La Verrue sous le nez (Wart Under the Nose)” (1951)
■ Lee Bontecou’s “Untitled” (1990-2000)
Nerdishly 