Tag: Art

This magic leaf knows what I'm planning.

Turning the “Remember me” checkbox from websites into 2-inch magnets and placing them around Chicago.

Why I duct-taped a postcard to my shoe and mailed it to my alma mater for an art exhibit.

If you fold a baseball card into an origami crane, this is what it looks like. The origami is quite tiny. Using an X-Acto blade, I peeled a baseball card into two parts. I folded the front of the card…

When pressing leaves in a book, write a caption about the leaf on an envelope. Then put the leaf inside the envelope into the book. You'll press a story with the leaf.

Last Wednesday I celebrated 25 years of spudart.org. Today, on the actual anniversary, I totally forgot. I was busy leaving a treasure chest behind the abandoned shopping carts at Jewel.

Four sculptures on the New York Times list don't work until a stranger does something. Bend the aluminum. Take a candy. Eat the pad thai. Follow the instructions on the wall.

The night I met Joseph Jachna, and the photo I didn't understand until this week.

The Art Institute of Chicago just released a beast of a Monet digital catalog with insanely high res zoom. You can see individual brushstrokes and even photomicrographs of the paint layers.

September 1 is World Letter Writing Day. Everybody gets letters on paper, so this year try aluminum foil and a Sharpie. Your friend will read your words with their own face behind them.

I thought someone had covered a beach rock with mosaic tiles just because. Then I learned the history behind this famous shark rock.

I was searching my photos for: Mark Rothko. I was hoping to find that I photographed some close-up shots of his paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. But instead, Google Photos served me up a 2011 photo from my…

A few mystery deer sculptures showed up in an Oregon roundabout. Then more appeared. Then googly eyes. Then a pink flamingo. It reminded me of a weird little toy installation that grew inside Tribune Tower back in 2002.

A stranger at Buona Beef gave my daughters foam star stickers as a random act of encouragement. Before we left, I told her I also carry star stickers in my wallet. She couldn't believe it. Honestly, I couldn't either.

I started repairing hail damage and accidentally created a large-scale exterior art installation.

I found an artwork featuring a pay phone in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. That somehow led me to a decades-old webpage listing the museum’s pay phone numbers — and memories of my own pay phone art project from…

Giving an urban icon a second life, then watching that life quietly fade. One of the few buildings to survive the Great Chicago Fire, the Chicago Water Tower still stands on Michigan Avenue. It’s part of the identity of Chicago.…

Virtuosity was the NY Times Word of the Day recently. It’s always fun searching abstract words in Google Photos. You’ll often come up with some surprising results. This image came up in my Google Photos. When you first see the…

I made this wire figure and put him on a swing in Chicago’s Winnemac Park. This is an art series called “Get into the swing of”. The series is meant to encourage people to enjoy the area where they view…

I can’t stop thinking about a Christo print of a wrapped computer. It’s high-tech (for 1985), completely unusable, and somehow full of care.

Well, I completely botched this blog post. Yeah, that's the actual summary. I'm keeping it up, because it's hilarious how badly wrong I got it.

Two overlapping bootprints in the snow make a perfect heart. Shoe hearts? Heartsteps? Snowstep hearts?...

People who have used a camera for decades remember when horizontal was the default way to take a photo. If an everyday person turned the camera sideways for a vertical shot, that was considered a fancy technique. For much of…

A kneaded eraser is part tire, part chewing gum, part volcanic ash.

The Art Institute doesn't own any Banksy works, but their search engine created the next best thing—accidental connections between street art, ancient sculptures, and Impressionism. See how Bankoni, Monet, and Bakst became honorary Banksy works.

You can build this in your backyard! 104 landscape stakes + string = your own Sol LeWitt croquet course. Takes conceptual art from museum walls to playable outdoor experience. Instructions included

A train ride to nature should be relaxing, right? Not for this fisherman, who looks ready to cast us out instead of a line. What’s going on here?

Both the Yoda shirt and my t-shirt project grapple with the challenge of knowledge dissemination. How do you make abstract ideas tangible? Can clothing truly be a vessel for wisdom?

I’ve started a new art series where I leave notes on benches: If I come across a bench that I have never sat in, I will stop and sit in that bench for at least sixty seconds. #enjoybenches In a…

What are some good materials to create notes for public benches?

Today is #PoemInYourPocketDay! I'm carrying this little poem about pausing to sit on benches you've never rested on before.