Sarah and I like to stroll through our neighborhood park, and one of the features we like about the park is the public “mural bench.” It is painted and repainted every year by community residents, on Father’s Day. So a fun activity while strolling is taking a look at various artist renderings. Ever since last [...]
Rockefeller Center is trying to mirror Millennium Park – literally. Anish Kapoor is the architect behind Chicago’s famous “Cloud Gate [Bean]” sculpture, and he designed the soon-to-be-installed “Sky Mirror [Sphere]” image in New York City. Looks a little like M.C. Escher if you ask me. What this computer rendering (above) doesn’t show is the gaggle [...]
In what might be considered an colossal procrastination act, I was reading about the artist Claes Oldenburg today, an artist who creates everyday life sculptures for the public sphere. Perfect for this blog. For example, I used to see this one, called Typewriter Eraser, Scale X that sits outside of the D.C. National Gallery of [...]
For the summer class I’m co-teaching, Cities and Citizens, students did an ethnography of a Chicago mural. The assignment: find a public mural (we used Mary Gray’s Guide to Chicago’s Murals), observe human interaction around it for 30 minutes, and turn in a one-to-two page report. Mary Gray featured 181 murals in her book, but [...]
