The Wife took off this week for vacation. If we had any money we might have gone visit her sister or something, but we don't so we're doing a "staycation" of sorts. I'm not 100% into this (a lot of it has involved shopping trips to get The Girls their school supplies and clothes), but have been letting myself be dragged away from the computer for significant chunks of the day.
As I've probably mentioned, we typically have 2 "cultural institution" family memberships in rotation at any given time. These are fairly expensive, but not when compared with the one-day tickets to many of these museums, etc. Right now we have memberships to the Shedd Aquarium and the Museum of Science & Industry. Yesterday we went to the Shedd, and I was reminded that if we just go there twice in a year (and we probably average 4-5 visits), we're way ahead of the game.
Anyway, it was an awesome day and I tried to put together a nice panorama looking back to the city. Unfortunately, on its "auto" setting, my camera is doing some exposure tweaks, so this did not stitch together so well ... but it's pretty sweet if you can get past the sky being different blues.
I still think the best place for shooting the skyline is out at the Adler Planetarium, but we've not had a membership there for a while.
Today, I opted out of the morning activities (The Girls wanted to check out some new ride they had out at Navy Pier), but told them that I'd join them down at the Art Institute. Actually, it was The Wife who was interested in this one, as she wanted to see the new Modern Wing that opened recently. This summer they've had two free days a month for Illinois residents down there, and today was one of those, so we decided to take advantage of that. It was a pretty amazing collection (it's still getting fleshed out, with a couple of galleries not up and running yet), with lots of "famous" art by the likes of Picasso, etc.
I snapped a few pictures while there (specifically to share with you here), and put them together in the following. I didn't jot down who did what (as the concept was evolving as I went through) on these, though ...
... although I know that the middle one on the right side is by Yves Tanguy, whose work I've long admired, and the one in the lower left is "Hat Rack" by Marcel Duchamp, which is largely here because of its eerie similarity to the Flying Spaghetti Monster! In the other lower corner is a bit of a blurry "self portrait" ... via this one piece where the artist screened an image of herself working in her sketchbook from the back onto a mirror, so it looks like you are what she's going to be sketching!
The building itself is interesting with a large central space (the pic was taken from the "balcony" where they have a cafe) and you can enter it from the main museum, through its own ground-level entrance, and via a "skybridge" spanning Monroe St. from Millennium Park which lets folks in on the second level of the west part of the Modern Wing.
So, there you go ... a reasonably "content rich" post. I have a couple of books sitting here waiting for me to get around to reviewing them, so you have that to look forward to in the not-too-distant future as well.
