My Bucket List or I always
referred to it as My Life List;
MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
First off, you must know that the major museums have a free day either Monday or Tuesday.? You'll have to check the Internet for that info, but it is well worth it to check into it. If you know someone who lives in the Chicago area or has a library card with the city of Chicago, you are entitled to check out a museum pass for up to two weeks and you can take up to 12 people. One museum pass will get 12 people into one museum. Sometimes you have to call around the libraries to find a library that has not checked out all of their passes... and for an annual fee you can have a library card when you're from another city. If you're visiting Chicago with many people, it could be well worth the annual fee.
THE HAROLD WASHINGTON LIBRARY
This is the greatest library really. Often times there are performances of classical music or a lecture or book lecture in the library and is worth looking into. You can listen to many of the lectures and even concerts online at the library podcasts (correction: pod-cast are available with-out a card and are very worth the listening) if you have a library card / I still have mine and I love getting the option of thousands of great books on tape, online. And the lectures online are great.
The library offers gazillions- of news publications and has an entire floor devoted to them. They also have sound-proof rooms to practice violin or other instruments that are essential to practice whole-heartedly and without disturbance/ I had many friends with the Evanston Symphony and such and it is a nice feature.
The library also has a gallery on the first floor and has access from the loop train. It is really very nice as you can hop off the train and just about walk right into the library doors... and in the winter you can visit the cafe in the library and grab a coco. Make a day of it! It is quite worth it!
Columbia College
The South Michigan Avenue building has a lounge /sandwiches and soft drinks/ and a student gallery/ on one side, (the E. Wabash entrance) and on the Michigan Avenue entrance, you can enjoy their, small, but amazing photograph gallery. Columbia College Chicago has at least 17 buildings in the LOOP of busy Chicago and there is much to explore.
www.colum.edu/About_Columbia/Maps_-_Building_Directories/623_S._Wabash_Building.php
If you get a chance to visit, take some time, and go up to the Columbia College Chicago Library: They have a large film department and you can watch a movie in the library.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
They are just a stones throw away from Columbia College on Michigan Avenue, and also have a great library, but their student gallery is always great and is well worth the stop. The School walks right into the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago and that is always a treat. Don't forget to visit downstairs in the museum in the children's area where kids can paint all day and take something home!
Across the street from the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago is the Symphony Center. If you're looking for a part time job-call / they are always looking for professional phone sales and reception. But that is not the fun of it all there- it is the symphony orchestra practices. You have to be a student or talk your way through... the practices of all of the symphony players and the grand conductors is wonderful. Occasionally, you might see Yo-yo Ma or Bernard Haitink / I was lucky enough to meet the late George Solti, and that practise was pure magic and never to be forgotten.
I've only just begun to tell you
of it all. I'll write more later.
Drawing Class @
The Palette and Chisel:
If you're an artist and like to draw outside of your studio and the university setting, you might try Palette and Chisel. http://www.paletteandchisel.org/ It is a wonderful drawing center with good solid instruction. I feel that, when you’re warming up your skills as an artist, it is more often a delightful inspiration to work live in a studio setting with others who draw and like to create to feel more connected to people and to what you like to do.
The Palette and Chisel is a beautiful center with great character in its teaching and in its environment as it is centrally located near the Chicago loop and borders the Gold Coast area of galleries, bookstores, shopping and inexpensive but extraordinarily scrumptious foods from many ethnic backgrounds.
I tell you of the Palette and Chisel today as thoughts of this story came back to me:
It was in 1996 when I was on Clark Street at a shop with a dear friend of mine as she needed a dress she could wear to her graduate recital, at NWU School of Music. She was completing her doctorate and was about to perform a work that she had written for cello.
The shop was tiny, maybe in a twenty foot by thirty foot space with a large attractive abstract oil on the wall and a sofa set in the middle of the floor. There was a sculpture of a beautiful hand, carved in marble laying on the floor and only two large racks of clothes. We shuffled through the racks that were all one of a kind and exceptionally made. As I further examined the marble hand, a man appeared from the back room. And then a woman appeared... He began to talk about the marble hand and how it was made at length as he revealed that he was the artist of the sculpture. Then he quickly denounced himself and spoke of the women next to him who was his wife. They both worked in the back of the shop designing and making the wonderful clothes. As we continued, I they told me of their journey.
She was a young girl, and they met as he was with his father who was in the military and they had visited communist China. And then, the young boy and his father left China.
She said: as she grew older, she escaped tenement square and moved to the states to find him, she spent several years in the United States before she knew where he was. And, then she found him in Chicago. There they were, years later, both artist and both in a magnificent shop of exquisitely designed cotton clothes that they worked at creating together.
That is when I found out about the Palette and Chisel.
My friend and I left the shop that day and knew that we had found endearing friends. They shared many little stories on that first day and days after as they had spoken of the Palette and Chisel which the clothiers loved, and attended as they worked with the human figure in a class room setting.
I called a few days later after I received a call from my graduating friend who was a bit nervous. We still had not found a dress for her and she was unsure as to what to wear. I said to her on the phone that I had seen the perfect dress at that little shop and that I would call and have it held.
As the graduating friend of mine stopped into the shop to pick up the dress, she had to be fitted. The woman of the shop just ran her hand down the back of my friend and then took the dress and disappeared into the back. Shortly after, she returned with the dress that she had altered without a tape measure and the dress was perfectly fitted.
Laurence and Tonge owned the shop for many years later and did very well as it completely paid for their home and their retirement. They even gave me lessons in the back as to how to cut a dress pattern and put it all together. It was more than a quaint experience to meet them as later, I attended many Sunday events at the shop enjoying small catered brunches with goodies sent from the Swedish and Middle Eastern Bakeries down the street. On those mornings we almost always enjoyed a string player too. But it was always with great company and an exchange of stories that would fill my memories for a life time and satisfy my heart for more than an eternity to know that such people of the world do exist….
Anyway, that's the latest memory and
I'll tell you more in the New Year of 2009...
It's February 1st 2009 and I'm still thinking how lucky we are in the United States and it brings me to a memory I treasure because I know that I am fortunate and how glad am I to know it.
Where Did All the Art Go: It was the year 1999. I had put away my steel-toed boots and blue jeans that they insisted I purchase for the foundry at one of the schools. Working in the sculpture department meant that you would be working around molten bronze and iron, with welding tools, table saws, miter saws, band saws, and well every piece of equipment that it takes to create a sculpture large enough to put in front of the Sears Tower. Some saws were even equipped with Freon spilling from it to keep the blades cool as you cut thick large sheets of steel into noticeably fine details of your proposed drawing or imagined imagery for the new work at hand. I remember spending a lot of extra time in the sculpture department and dreamed of creating a monumental work of art one day.
I spent my evenings in my studio in Chicago, that was not small, but small compared to the amazing sculpture studio in the foundry. Though, I continued to work on paintings and even small scale sculpture in my spare time. No need for the boots because, it was my suites that I wore during the day to meet and greet clients in the financial district as was the dress code through all most all of my schooling during full time work in Winettka while attending full time school.
My days now were filled with high profile executive assignments from what was, The Choice For Staffing, now / http://www.mackltd.com/index.html. I was focused and busy, but Saturdays were mine and I went down to Devon Avenue to the Jewish/Indian market to buy great breads and exotic fruits as well as all of my vegetables. Then I would return home to unpack the kitchen and go back out to walk over to Clark Street to buy some goods from the Mexican market. There coco was especially good and you could buy actual sugar cane still in the cane form and delightfully fresh to eat.
It was during this walk that a woman approached me. She wanted to know how to catch the train. I could not understand her at all but as many people in Chicago helped me to find my many assignments in the loop, I too stopped to help this woman who seemed desperate. After just a minute, she said the words "Bank One". I said, oh, Bank One! She said, Cleaning...
and I thought for a moment. She was assigned to clean Bank One on Saturdays I thought? We talked more and as she spoke an English word or two, I began to realize that I was right. I took her on the train to Bank One in the loop that day because I feared she would get lost. As we rode the train together, I learned many things about this lovely woman who couldn't speak English. She was a refugee from the Croatian war and living at a center full of displaced people in the same circumstances. We finally arrived in the loop where I took her to the Bank One Building so she could begin her work and have pay to live. I managed to get her to try and meet me in front of the store we met at so that we could brush up her English, and then I traveled 45 minutes back home by train.
We agreed to meet the next day, and there she was. We walked to a coffee shop, ordered and then, got to work on her English. I found out many things throughout the next few weeks and I was glad to have met her.
She was very brave and very smart, but knew little English. She had lost most of her family from war. She was alone in the world, yet she was surrounded by a city who really cared and she found some comfort in that. She met me once a week, and I felt as though I was the one getting the lesson. And then, one day, after her English had improved at rapid speeds, she did not show up anymore. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_War_of_Independence
She never knew that she had fullfilled a dream in which I had to temporrily move to China to teach English / a coleague of mine was from China and she went back after receiving her Masters in Business from Kellogg University. My friend and I spent many evenings at tea and conversation about China and the US.
This woman from Croatia was going to be okay. I knew it. And that makes me happy. Later, as years went by, I taught a great deal in the arts and during that day I learned the importance of what just teaching meant to this woman life and to the world. It would have been nice to have had funded programs for these people and all people really, because funded classes provide assistance in the aid to making sure people begin to thrive and have tool to thrive. Which means our communities thrive too. And if we all have time to assist people or teach people, inside or out side of the arts, then who would choose war....
