Alex's Summer Art Blog

Today there is far more access to art than ever before. Through the internet, we have the ability to transcend hundreds of miles with a click to experience more art that we could ever possibly see otherwise. However, though we can see the art through the screen it is very different from experience it ourselves. Therefore the existence of museums and public art galleries are still incredibly important within our societies. This makes it very worrisome that much art is still relatively inaccessible to a large part of society. Though I was fortunate enough to go to a school who has paid for it's students to have free access to the art institute, a regular guest would have to pay 25 dollars just for the basic admission. While the Art Institute is one of the more expensive art museums in chicago, it also offers the largest and most expensive collections. The other museums in chicago may have a lot of modern art that is easily accessible to the general public but the Art Institute is ...

When thinking of learning about art and culture in the midwest, it is hard to think that anywhere near the city could even begin to try and top the cultural Mecca of the midwest that is Chicago. While suburbian museums could never think of rivaling some of the cities top attractions like the Field Museum and the Art Institute, you would be surprised that the suburbs do still have many interesting museums to view. Well maybe you weren’t surprised, but I certainly was. My adventure began not with the front steps of a museum but in front of a Nutella and banana crepe at the Nutella Cafe. After a Chicago river architecture tour Monday morning, I had made my way to the cafe to eat some hazelnutty goodness while I searched for the final destination of my Chicago trip for my own adventure. After chowing down (amazing, by the way) I quickly pulled out my laptop to find directions to my next adventure. A quick word of advice to any art tourist: never try to go to an art museum on a ...

One of the things that I love about art is that is has the ability to transcend the art world and enact real change in the real world. The way it does this is by infusing activism and critique into the artwork itself which then convince people to care more deeply about a problem that they may have not known about before. And then those viewers walk away and enact that real-world change by voting or protesting or doing a number of other things. If you haven’t guessed by now that I deeply care about the environment, maybe you guessed it by two of my blog posts have centered around artists whose works have centered around environmentalism. The protecting and saving environment are important issues that need to be discussed on every level; in politics, in literature, and yes in art. Today I will review several artworks that have been found along our trip through Chicago and discuss why environmental issues are so important that artist of almost every genre are depicting it. At the M...

So setting out at the beginning of the week, I was tasked to find 15 different piece of public art all following specific guidelines. Any guesses as to how many I got? You will just have to read to figure that out. Our first stop on our trip around the art scene of Chicago takes us inside the Chicago Cultural Center to the 4th floor to visit Keith Haring’s Chicago mural to fulfill the “a colorful mural” requirement. This building is open 7 days a week to anyone who would like to walk in, open most days from 10 am to 7 pm. While our art scene scavenger hunt will take us on several more stops through the cultural center, Keith Haring’s mural is a wonderful spot to stop and take a moment to see. While this exhibit only contains one-fourth of the entire mural, it is an important part of Chicago history. The next stop on our tour takes us somewhere near the Chicago Board of Trade building for the requirement of “a not-so-colorful mural”. Though I can’t be entirely certain where th...

According to the chicago architecture tour by the Chicago Architecture Foundation, philosophers have defined architecture as a building that is pleasing to the eye as well as permanent in structure. However, modern society has put other pressures onto architecture such as disability accessibility, drastic weather patterns such as hurricanes, and the specific issue that I would like to discuss today, environmental awareness. More and more drastically, society is pushing for it's cities to be more environmentally aware. A recent development in this was many United States cities signing onto the Paris Agreement, a global United Nations agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even as the President Donald Trump took the whole of the US out of that deal. According to the City of Chicago Press Office, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel was one of those many majors that have signed onto that very agreement. In fact, the city of Chicago commits to environmental sustainability that requ...

For centuries, high art society has been dominated by European art that has filled art museums to the brim in work made almost entirely by white Europeans. Recently, however, museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago have come to recognize that there is a whole beautiful world out there that has been making art for even longer than European cultures. While the contemporary art community is doing good work in raising up artist from a wide variety of cultures, there is still a full rich history to explore from the centuries of the past. While walking through the Art Institute for my first of two days that I would get to spend at one of the best museums in Chicago, I decided to visit that Islamic art exhibit since I have never been in it before or at least thoroughly studied it. The culture of Islam is one that is wide and global spanning several different countries. According to Pew Research, there are currently 1.6 billion people in the world who are Muslim. For reference, that ...