Chicago in bad air

Last week we went to Chicago to meet up with the Denver portion of the family, Mark’s son and daughter-in-law and their two kids, 1 year and three years old.

The original plan was that we’d meet up late afternoon-ish Wednesday and probably go to Navy Pier and see what kind of fun we could have there, maybe get dinner of some type. Then in the morning, go to the Field Museum maybe, Pokemon fossils <grin> or the Shedd Aquarium. 

Mark and I got to Chicago around noon, and went and got lunch at Publican Quality Meats. It was really hot so we took the green line instead of walking as we might have done. 

Then the scheduling problems started. The kids arrived at O’Hare but were having trouble picking up their rental car, because Megan had somehow lost her ID on the plane. She had a digital version, but the car rental company wouldn’t accept that.

We went to the Art Institute while we waited for them to get into town. This is a fountain in one of their gardens, that hasn’t been open much recently, I guess because it needed repair. Looks good now. Way better than the reflecting pool in DC.

The big show at the Art Institute was Willem de Kooning, who I am pretty sure hated women, at least judging from the way he depicted them, twisted and grotesque. I did like some of his less figurative things, especially some big drawings done India ink, that were framed so that you could see the back and the front, and see the ink bleeding through.

In the label, the curators discuss the religious imagery at length. Personally I don’t get how a purple smear “recalls Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary”, but I’m certainly not an expert in Christian iconography.

In the lower-right corner of Abstraction, a skull and a nail rest at the foot of a ladder. These traditional symbols of the Passion narrative, which recounts Jesus’s final week on earth, are commonly found in medieval and Renaissance depictions of the Crucifixion and Deposition. The splashes of red paint throughout reference the blood Jesus shed on the cross. The purple amoeba at the lower left-which recalls Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary kneeling before the cross—is a descendant of the hiplike shape, or truncated torso, that forms the yellow motif in Study for “Pink Angels” (1945), also in this gallery.

I disagreed with the label for this one, too. They called the pink shapes voluptuous and a “sensuously curving female body”, and they don’t look like that to me.

I think i agreed with the label for this one the most.

This comical, wiggly figure appears to leap excitedly from a bench-their oversized, round-toe shoes recalling the wooden clogs of the artist’s native Holland. De Kooning delighted in juxtaposing comedic elements with art historical subjects, in this case pushing the seated portrait genre into the realm of absurdity. As he observed, “Beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It’s more joyous.

After de Kooning, we went to look at another small show, Self, Made: Fourteen Modern Artists from the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection. I liked this one a lot more. Mostly outsider art collected by two Chicagoans. When I walked through I thought, oh OK, outsider artists and there’s a few Cindy Shermans in here too, and John Waters and Kara Walker. So a few sort of more mainstream artists. The exhibiton website has a paragraph that explains: “The Sandors also closely followed the careers of Cindy Sherman and Kara Walker, convinced of their critical talent and committed to supporting art by women and people of color. Sherman and Walker, along with filmmaker John Waters and French installation artist Annette Messager, add perspectives from the center of the established art world…”

After the art, we got coffee and got checked in at our hotel. The kids set up a Door Dash cart and we ordered pizza and went to meet them at their fancy hotel, the Langham, in a Mies building. They were using credit card points so got a good deal. We stopped at a 7-11 and got a couple big bottles of water on the way. After we ate, Mark and I headed back South to out less shi-shi hotel, and had a quiet night. I washed my hair.

In the morning we looked out our big hotel window facing and north and realized what we could see was actually bad air, not fog. I treated myself to coffee in bed using the hotel’s fancy and more eco-friendly coffee maker. No plastic Keurig cups, it pours water over the coffee in a filter in a cardboard holder that are all compostable. Or at least more biodegradable, if they don’t get composted.

We went out for more coffee, since the stuff from the cute coffee maker is not Mark’s thing, and we went and browsed at the Daley Plaza Farmers Market, which is Thursday mornings. We bought a cinnamon roll that we ate before taking any pictures, and a scone (that we didn’t eat and good thing because later Rowan gobbled it up for snack after playing hard at the Children’s Museum), and some baked donuts from Daly’s Donuts (note different spelling), a bakery that has evidently just gotten its own space up on Armitage tha I think we could get to pretty easily.

We consulted with the kids, and made a plan, We checked out of the hotel and took our stuff to their hotel. Then Mark and Rowan and I went to the Children’s Museum on he bus to stay out of the bad air, and Megan and Callan napped.

At the Children’s Muesum, we played inside for a good three hours.

It got even smokier outside.

We headed back to the kids hotel on the bus, and ordered in lunch like we ordered the pizza the night before. Another round of PQM sandwiches; the kids had the Turkey Bacon Ranch, and we had the Porchetta. Megan ordered hers no ranch, and couldn’t figure out why they put so much more meat on Ethan’s. Maybe two different sandwich makers for the same order. We ate lunch, bid farewell, they took off for the Indiana Dunes for a long weekend with friends, and we were back in Madison around 3:30. 

Where the air was even worse Friday.

One week later, the Madison cops murdered a black man in the street, at the corner of Baldwin and Willy. There’s so much more to tell, but that will have to be another post.