Chicago Art Institute

.

On my way to the Art Institute, I walked through Millenium Park again.








Here's the Carbon and Carbide building from Millenium Park:





The Art Institute has varied and extensive holdings of all sorts of wonderful things. I'm going to show you some of my favorites.

There are many miniature rooms. I love that you can look through from the main room to another room, or to a view of the outdoors in many of the rooms. To the left of the hutch with the dishes, you can see the bedroom.





This is my favorite of the dozens of rooms:





There are artifacts from all over the world. An Egyptian ram.



A Greek donkey. (He is a drinking vessel.)





Portrait of a Roman who lived in Egypt (found with his mummy).




A Mayan warrior.





A Chinese bottle.





A Japanese woodcarving.





An art museum presents some of the same obstacles to the photographer that are found at the zoo. Barriers, barriers, barriers and reflections. I couldn't get the angle I wanted, a fair amount of the time, because I had to avoid the worst of the reflections. Luckily I can photoshop things back to square, even when I was forced to shoot them from the side, or from underneath.

If you look at my "portrait" shot posted yesterday, you'll see two effects of reflection -- the light areas on the left, and a pretty clear image of moi on the right. I try to be conscious of everything in the frame when I'm taking pics. It's so easy to see only my intended subject, and miss "noise" like reflections, busy backgrounds, whatever. Even though I try, I often am too single-minded (single-eyed?) to notice things that will be (sometimes impossibly) distracting in my photo.

This comes up now, because the Cornells have glass on their fronts, so I did a lot of shifting around, trying to avoid the worst of the reflection.......

The Institute has a large collection of assemblages by Joseph Cornell. Cornell makes really good use of the "3-d-ness" of his objects -- look at how prominent the shadows are.....





Of course the Institute also has miles of paintings, including La Grande Jatte.

This is one of my favorites. It is by William Trost Richards, an artist whose work I wish I knew better. I love the way the water reflects the light not only from the sun, but also from the clouds.





This is perhaps the very first image of a comb-over mohawk.





Of course, as it is Chicago, there is a collection of architectural embellishments.

This one's for you, Mom. I think it's cool that the colored bits are iridescent.





In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these Chicago posts, a link to the next one is here.

.