2004 Year in Review

Art in Chicago

Every year for Mother’s day (since neither my husband or I have surviving mothers) we do something I want to do. One year we drove to Tampico and had breakfast at the Dutch Diner then toured the Dillan Home Museum.

This year my son told me he wanted to go to an art exhibit in Chicago. I told him it was Mother’s Day and he had a sad look while asking what I wanted to do on Mother’s Day. “Go to an art exhibit in Chicago, of course,” I replied.

What a day it was. We parked at Navy Pier and rode the free trolley over to Michigan Avenue and then walked north to the Museum of Contemporary Art. All but my husband had visited their exhibit on the top floor but the featured exhibit on the main floor was what we were there for.

Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective is MCA’s current exhibit. The show started in Los Angeles, is in Chicago through the end of May, and then travels to New York’s MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), Queens, New York, from July 28 to September 27, 2004.

Bontecou was a rising female sculpturer in the 60’s and 70’s. She created welded structures covered with canvas and other items. Since that time she has left the art world and little of her art has been seen. This exhibit brings her art to the forefront again and it is definitely something for the modern art lover to see.

The exhibit is divided into two rooms. Her known works borrowed from art museums and collectors and her newer works. The older works were drab colored and showed her protest of the Vietnam War and other political issues at the time. Most of the pieces either looked like an eye watching the room or a camera lens viewing the scene. Some interpret the holes as part of space to view into.

Her newer pieces include more fabric on welded frame but now she’s added light and color. But the newer pieces using porcelain, silk and wire that suspend above the floor like a mobile are so three dimensional that no photograph could do them justice. All her work, because it is three-dimensional, must be viewed in person. This exhibit is the only chance most in the area will get to view it.

After touring MCA we walked along the lake back to Navy Pier to see Art Chicago. The huge art exhibit encompasses 200 art galleries from all over the world: from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York to Paris, Seoul, and London.

Well-known artists such as Picasso, Andy Warhol, or Roy Lichtenstein to newer artists that someday will be hanging in a museum, you can see it all. I saw one piece priced at $60,000 but many more were un-priced and probably worth much more. The huge exhibition hall is filled with over 2000 paintings, photographs, and sculptures. But Art in Chicago only lasts one weekend out of the year and is over for this year.

You can spend a lot of cash going into Chicago for the day. Between high priced gas and the tolls to food, parking, and museum entry, the day was very expensive, but the chance to see great art like we did is priceless.

by Barb Benson, theCity1.com
May 11, 2004