February 2010

  • March is Youth Art Month

    By sarajean on 2/28/10 3:36pm
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    Doesn’t it just break your heart every time you hear about another art program being killed at another school? And it’s usually before a sports program—particularly football—is cut, of course. Excuses abound about how sports are great for students—and they can be—but all in all, we all know that it comes down to money and what brings volunteers, donors, and publicity, doesn’t it?

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  • Worcester Art Museum, Worcester Massachusetts

    By lisala on 2/25/10 10:45pm
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    The Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts is a tiny gem. It's not a terribly well known museum, though it is well-respected. The Worcester Art museum's collection includes items from eras and cultures ranging from the pre-historic to the twentieth century, from Pre-Columbian art, to Babylonian, Classical, Medieval and European traditions. The Worcester Art Museum Web page describes the museum's holdings as a 35,000-piece collection of paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, photography, prints, drawings and new media that span 5,000 years of art and culture. The painters include European and American artists, like Cassatt, Gauguin, Goya, Monet, Sargent and Whistler. But mostly, it's the early works that interested me.

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  • Chicago in Buidlings: The Thompson Center

    By cobwebsandstrange on 2/16/10 9:23am
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    Approaching the Thompson Center from the south-east, the building conjures the image of an enormous birthday cake rendered in architectural terms during the ‘80s. At the same time that the structure is laughably ugly in that manner, it also seems to be reaching upwards. The fact that government is in place to uplift the common people, or at least that’s how some see it, could be the ideal related here.

    What compounds the haughty feeling of achievement is the Jen Dubuffet sculpture that sits out front. This particular piece of public art compliments the building in that it points upwards, again, making its viewer feel that there is an ideal that Chicago is close to grasping.

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  • Chicago in Buidlings: the Daley Center

    By cobwebsandstrange on 2/10/10 10:01pm
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    Housing courtrooms and constructed in a simple manner, the Daley Center probably shouldn’t physically appear to be an inviting governmental building. The wide open space that serves as a place for employees, lawyers and those who are amidst some sort of litigation to smoke cigarettes allows any visitor to take various views of the structure making the building seem more approachable, even as it’s a far sight taller than the neighboring City-County Hall.

    The untitled Picasso sculpture that sits in-front of the building and just to the right of the entrance and exit for the train adds to a surprisingly open and friendly feeling of the space. It’s all a bit confusing entering the Daley Center it’s darkly colored floors and high ceilings are complicated by a series of roped off areas and metal detectors.

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  • Chicago in Buidlings: City-County Hall

    By cobwebsandstrange on 2/10/10 7:12pm
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    From any of the four corners that Chicago’s City-County Hall takes up, it seems like a fortress.

    The exterior of the building is able to make any passerby feel tiny and insignificant by comparison. What goes on behind closed doors in the one hundred year old building isn’t accessible to most common folks and certainly not any random pedestrian. That’s pretty clear.

    Catching a glimpse of the lions’ heads that litter the façade of the building’s exterior sides is supposed to summon a heroic notion of what transpires inside. Or it might be a warning. By dint of the building’s imposing stature, though, it doesn’t make a difference: walking through any one of the City-County Hall’s entrances doesn’t seem hospitable.

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  • Legalese and the Broadway Steps

    By becksta on 2/4/10 4:25pm
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    Jack MackieJack MackieThe famous steps on Broadway might not be here for long.

    Jack Mackie who created the famous Broadway Steps on Capitol Hill in Seattle is currently embroiled in a very complex copyright dispute with a photographer who took a shot of a woman dancing on the steps several years ago. Apparently, Jack Mackies owns the rights to the photograph because of an earlier case, but has since written letters about the use of the photographs for 2 days on a stock photography site and might be seeking thousands of bucks from the photographer, who claims that he received $80 at most for the shot.


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  • Modern Magic Realism

    By msarko on 2/2/10 9:03pm
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    "Tuesday's Child" by Michael Parkes"Tuesday's Child" by Michael Parkes

    The best art of the 20th century reflected modernist and postmodernist ideas of mutable perception, playing with the way the eye attends to light and how the mind processes concepts with near-automatic preconception. Where surrealists like Salvador Dali pushed these quirks to the extreme, juxtaposing unrelated images and delving into the idiosyncrasies of their own dreams, a subsequent movement known as Magic Realism attempted to take the same sense of fancy and apply it to more recognizable themes. From painters to filmmakers, the idea of incorporating the unrealistic into the familiar without a knee-jerk shock reaction resonated then and continues to capture imaginations today.



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