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Hercules and Lichas, c. 1600/25, Italian Art Institute of Chicago reference number 1968.613European Painting and Sculpture, Gallery 206 While photographing the feet of a sculpture of two naked men wrestling, at the Art Institute of Chicago, a guard stopped me. She asked what the clip was on my camera. I walked over to her, and […]
Bring a cheap kaleidoscope lens with you to an art museum, and you’ll be guaranteed to have an ever-changing wonderful time. You can get one for $8 on Amazon (and you’ll also get a whole array of other fun lenses). The best artwork to view through a kaleidoscope lens is still life with fruit. Here […]
While I was walking through the Art Institute of Chicago today, I was thinking about how this artwork is the artwork that I have the most immediate physical access to. I work two blocks north from this grand museum. If I wanted to look at just a painting, these are the paintings that are the […]
Stand right in front of a Degas pastel drawing, and try photographing a 360-degree photograph with multiple-stitching. You get some fun results with how the application auto-stitches the exposures together. Normally, 360-degree panorama apps like this are meant to photograph a larger scene outdoors, or maybe even a room. On my iPhone I use 360 […]
Can Jackson Pollock paintings be displayed any which way? Upside-down, sideways? Sure, why not? Especially when the paintings are reproduced into two-inch magnets. The Art Institute of Chicago takes some of their most famous art, reprints it into tiny two-inch squares and then seals it within a quarter-inch thick piece of acrylic. Holding these acrylic […]
A floor-to-ceiling shelf holding hundreds of books. Makes a beautiful backdrop. But you can’t read the books. You can’t even touch them. It’s a work of art. Oooook. I need to investigate this artwork further. During lunch I breezed through the Art Institute of Chicago. An unexpected visit on my part, because the nearby McDonalds […]
The candy pile is the first artwork the Art Institute acquired in 1999. It has the reference number of 1.1999. I googled all the other years from 1879 to 2018. Yup, that’s 139 Google searches. Google totally DID NOT like me doing that many searches. Anyhow, I only came up with two more artworks: 1.2001 and […]
Want to visit the Art Institute of Chicago?—but wait—you are out of yogurt. That’s the dilemma I found myself in this afternoon. I wanted to visit some fine art, but I was out of fine yogurt. Perhaps one can survive on art alone, but my body needs the protein of the Chobani Flip. Specifically Salted […]
The John Singer Sargent exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago is closing this weekend. Thankfully my brother informed me of that this morning. Now that I work within walking distance of the Art Institute, I wanted to take full advantage of being able to hop right in. What a joy it is to take […]
Frame conservation. Picking the right frame to match artwork from centuries ago. The Art Institute of Chicago has an employee with the title of Assistant Conservator for Preparation and Framing. Kirk Vuillemot has been restoring and creating frames for the museum since 1986. The Art Institute’s asked him five questions in their post post, “Meet […]
