The Chicago Art Institute

Cool place. I was there for roughly four hours and still didn't see it all. The day began by taking the #6 bus downtown. An interesting experience. It was quite crowded and I had to stand right at the back, where the topic of conversation was 'How I violated my parole yesterday'. It actually wasn't too hard to find the stop, since just about everyone got off there.

Once inside, I started in the basement with the photography and architecture exhibits. Just the entrance to the place is overwhelming - and it's so huge, with multiple buildings, we really don't have anything in Vancouver that holds a candle to it. Anyways, the photography exhibit was really cool, it featured reproduced prints done with different post-processing, digital and traditional darkroom, to show how the same print can have totally different moods/atmosphere depending on the post-process. So that was cool. The architecture exhibit featured drawings of a Greek Orthodox church in Chicago that was recently converted to a mosque, ha ha. In fact, just about all the architectural features of Chicago seem to revolve around religious centers.

I went upstairs at that point, and here there were a few American galleries, which to be honest were just not that interesting. But, there was a South-East Asian gallery, which was very cool. It featured pottery, jades, and paintings. The Korean gallery was especially interesting, possibly because I've already seen the Chinese and Japanese stuff about three or four times over (not that that's a bad thing!). There were a few pieces of pottery that were simply sublime.

By the time I finished going through there, I had already been there about two hours. I went upstairs and looked at some more boring American art. There is an interesting exhibit on African pottery though, beautiful pieces and very interesting didactic panels. I also had to check out the Greek/Roman/Egyptian gallery, which was a bit small for my tastes but had some interesting pieces. The explanations for the entire gallery are really well done, and it never seems to get repetitive or boring (except the American art).

Finally it was on to the Picassos, Matisses, etc., etc. Of which the gallery has many.

And home on the bus, whose driver gave humorous play-by-plays of the traffic situation, and when not doing that sang out loud. Funny guy.

I also managed to get some shots of downtown Chicago: