Tag: Art Institute of Chicago

What is the toilet paper like from various art museums? In 2018, I wrote a draft about making art with toilet paper. I never published it, because, well, this is a weird project. Now that toilet paper has surfaced as…

Need a moment to quiet your busy life and meditate on your mortality? Meditate on some skulls. Do you love skulls? Then you’ll love the El Greco exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Do you find skulls creepy? You’ll…

Here are 28 of my favorite artworks displayed in February 2020 from the Art Tab Chrome extension. Every time you open a new browser tab, you get a different work of art from the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. Tribune…

A couple weeks ago I started a project where on my lunch break, I go the Art Institute of Chicago, stand in front of an artwork, and sketch it. I set out with this project to help improve my drawing…

Another Guardian Lion‽ A pair of famous lions guard the entrance to the Art Institute of Chicago. Inside the museum resides another guardian lion. This unknown distant cousin comes from Cambodia. It currently sits guard at the entrance to one…

Imagine drawing everything in the Museum of Modern Art. And then doing it again a second time. That’s what artist Jason Polan did. Unfortunately, Jason, a 37-year-old, passed away last week. Only last week did I discover his artwork (due…

Imagine every time you open a new Chrome tab, you get a new work of art. The Art Institute of Chicago’s Google extension, Art Tab, places a random image from their giant collection into every new Chrome browser tab. Very…

I’d like to stand outside an art museum with a xerox machine, offering pedestrians the opportunity to make their own xerox selfie. All day long, visitors look at art behind glass. Give these visitors a chance to have a memorable,…

Ever come across a fun or interesting security guard at an art museum? Here’s my encounter with a security guard at the Art Institute of Chicago sharing her love of tiny details of paintings, encouraging visitors to get closer to…

The Impressionist painters are known for their atmospheric treatment of scenes, loose brushwork that takes precedence over lines and contours. Yet in the midst of the Impressionism galleries in the Art Institute of Chicago stands a painting with strong lines…

What do you do with all the greeting cards you receive? Keep them in a pile and then eventually recycle them? Perhaps you keep a hand-selected group, storing them in a box. Or maybe you put the greeting cards on…

Andy Warhol. The art world darling. The Art Institute of Chicago is putting on a big Warhol show. Members get a special preview during October 17-19, 2019. Can’t get into the members preview of the Warhol show? Get a cool…

The collection of 17th century Dutch and Flemish drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago is a nice display of work. Especially impressive is the large sign at the front of the exhibit. The Art Institute blew up a 6-inch…

What is the utility of hanging a drawing on a wall? How often do people change their wall decorations? Do people today continue to buy images to hang on their walls? Should a drawing instead be viewed with one’s hands?…

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 showed her how…

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 $26 on Amazon (and you’ll also get a whole array of other fun lenses).…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

Of the 18,4888 photos archived in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection, are there any you’d like to see displayed in the museum? This one by Jeff Mermelstein would be a good one: “Book in Mouth, New York City” Photographed in…

Tucked away in the Art Institute’s archives are thousands of wonderful photos. 18,488 to be exact. Whoa! You can explore these 18,488 photos on the Art Institute’s online collection. Are there any photos you’d like to see displayed at the…

Two monumental cultural events are about to happen in the same week: Star Wars is releasing episode VII: The Force Awakens The Art Institute is about to exhibit their largest donation of artwork ever. 44 monumental modern artworks were donated…

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…

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…

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…