An impressive show was put on by this year’s batch of BFA students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The expansive seventh floor of the Louis Sullivan Building on the State Street housed more than 300 artists’…
The fine art of napkins. Art that you can wipe your mouth with. The Art Institute currently has 11 napkins in their permanent collection. The height of the napkin collecting craze occured from 1983 to 1996. Nine of the eleven…
Ever want to get inside the artwork at an art museum? Now you can! Several people on Instagram and Flickr have demonstrate how they interact with artworks in museums. These seven methods are collected under the hashtag, #GetInsideTheArtInstituteofChicago. A clever…
Every year my company, Tribune Media Services, used to have award ceremonies. One of the awards was Rookie of the Year with the trophy/plaque thing being an actual Louisville Slugger baseball bat customized with the recipient’s name and his/her first…
Honeymoon is such an interesting word. The Japanese have a fun way of translating the word (as covered on my wedding blog). The French literally translates it as “moon of honey,” as seen on Etymonline.com: 1540s, hony moone, but probably…
The croquet twitter account @HammerTimeCroqu started following me today on Twitter. That is, they are following my croquet-dedicated Twitter account, @mightymauler. Yes, I have a Twitter account dedicated to croquet. Not just croquet, but my superhero alter-ego persona on the…
I am looking for a resident that lives on the planet Mercury. How do I search for this? Do I do a search on Twitter for “Mercury alien”? or perhaps “Mercury resident”? However on Twitter, you cannot search the location…
Time is short. People are watching you. Will you have the guts to draw something fun on a foggy window on the bus or train? These questions faced me this morning as with below zero degree temperatures in Chicago. Commuters…
A great reason to use the free service last.fm is that it tracks your music listening habits across many platforms like Spotify, Pandora, and iTunes. With this database of records the site then gives you insightful analysis to your listening…
Unique styrofoam constructions hand-crafted by artists to support the safe transit of art. A delicate sculptural bust is transformed from a bronze head to a rectangular box. All the space around the head is extended out to conform to cube.…
Two years ago the Art Institute of Chicago had 3,976 artworks on display. Now they have 4,715 on display. The Art Institute has a great website that shows their entire collection. You can even search for which artworks are on…
How would you react to discovering that an indoor basketball court is inside a 9,500 square foot house in the heart of one of Chicago’s most expensive neighborhoods? RT @curbedchicago: This huge 9500 sq. ft. Lincoln Park home has an…
What if you found a masterpiece painting laying on a busy sidewalk? Certainly you would look at it. Maybe you might even pick it up, or photograph it. During autumn we have millions of such masterpieces laying on our sidewalks.…
Transform the fun of tourist postcards into something beyond their normal function. Buy a tourist postcard and then fold it into a paper origami and leave it at the same postcard rack in the store. Make sure to leave the…
Someone on the train is using a phone with a cracked screen. I ask the person to pull up a photo on flickr or instagram. Then I take a photo of the person’s cracked screen showing the photo. People using…
Three wooden mansions floating on the Chicago River to be torched. Fire! Fire! Fire! For entertainment, everyone loves a good fire. A week before the festival, the wooden mansions sat by three Chicago bridges with a sign saying, “watch me…
Yeah! Take more photos! Taking photos makes you more observant of your surroundings. Pausing and considering things around you gives you perspective. Often I can get too wrapped up inside my head about life and worrying. To get outside of…
The bright orange pumpkins have arrived just in time for October. Rows and rows of fresh pumpkins sit happily behind a glossy black fence. Soft morning sunlight illuminates the contrast of orange against green. While photographing this scene, I wanted…
Every day Flickr ranks the top 500 photos posted to popular photo sharing service. 1.4 million photos are posted to the service every day, so to be ranked in the top 500 is quite an achievement. In 2014 alone, I…
You encounter what appears to be a wall of notes written by a crazy person. 23 sticky notes arranged on a grid by a seat on the train. Many reflective questions that question our perspective of life. Questions of self-awareness…
My Uncle Bill posted a few photos of a beach stone that looks like a heart. I ran his three images in Google Image search and came up with three other things his stone looks like: This beach stone looks…
“art” is at the core of “earth” so is: carte carts darts farts garth harts karts marts parts party tarts tarty warts warty Fun that art would be the core of farts, party, and warty. Then for 7-letter words, art…
If you say Seinfeld is a show about nothing, then you know nothing about the Seinfeld sitcom. Seinfield is about everything It’s not a show about nothing. It’s a show about everything, says Nico Lang of the Daily Dot’s great…
We love public transit, we hate public transit. Occasionally there are days that challenge us, as the Chicagoist demonstrates with its post, “9 Unfortunate Thoughts We’re All Are Having On The CTA.” While releasing angst about commuting can be therapeutic;…
The opportunity: The Art Institute of Chicago was asking for “surrealist objects” last week as a promotion for the current Magritte exhibit. The objects will be selected by the curator of the Magritte show and will be displayed in the…
One part finger monster. One part white-out. Inspired by Magritte’s surrealism exhibit at the Art Institute. Take all these together and what do you have? The “White-out Monster” who likes to paint things white. Yesterday I wrote up an interview…
Many of Chicago’s iconic buildings are white today, because of an unknown artist working today. This artist has managed to keep his identity relatively unknown for the past hundreds of years. He’s also managed to stay alive for the past…
Standing silently with other commuters at the bus stop. Only when the bus arrives, it’s not a bus, but a giant claw machine! The two dollars you slide into the bus vendor box gains you admittance inside the claw machine.…
If you had to make a surrealist sculpture only with office supplies and a finger monster, what would you make? Walking around the 14th floor of the Tribune Tower with a finger monster wedged onto my finger, I weighed my…
Old skyscrapers falling apart because of their limestone exterior. Over time the limestone becomes weak and crumbles. Restoration projects take quite some time to replace the damaged limestone. The Crains Communication building in Chicago is going through an extensive limestone…
