A native herbaceous plant, the Barrelhead Blazing Star grows tall, with purple tubular blossoms that attract long-tongued bees and butterflies as well as rabbits and deer. Once much more abundant, this plant may still be found in northern Illinois.
The Nodding Onion is a perennial in the lily family (Liliaceae) that sports white to pale pink blooms that attract butterflies. This specimen was collected by Anna Pedersen Kummer in 1943 from Stony Island in Chicago, a site that no longer exists. Now this plant is only found in northeastern Illinois.
The Chicago Academy of Sciences has a long history in Chicago. Founded in 1857, the Academy opened Chicago’s first public museum in 1869. That building, located at Wabash and Van Buren in the downtown area, was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Following the fire, the scientific community and public rallied around the Academy.
This study skin of a Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii) was collected in the northern Chicago suburb of Northfield, Illinois, in 1855 by Robert Kennicott, a well-known Illinois naturalist and one of the founders of the Chicago Academy of Sciences.
The phonograph had a profound impact on the way Americans experienced music. Prior to its invention, the only way to hear music was when it was played or sung live. Music was typically played in group settings, where all were welcome, and even expected, to sing along, and the melody was never played exactly the same way twice. The phonograph allowed people to listen to the songs they wanted to hear, when they wanted to hear them, and if they wanted to, they could even listen to them alone.
In 1890, lead architect Daniel Burnham took on the impossible task of designing a model city in Jackson Park in Chicago for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (also known as the Columbian Exposition, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the New World). The trouble was, architects and builders had just over two years to complete the monumental task. This baluster, recovered in archaeological excavations, is from a roof balustrade on the Ohio Building. The White City, as the collection of Fair buildings was known, was built to last as long as the fair (about six months).
Ted Halkin’s early works were highly-symbolic, id-driven reflections of his influences and love of archetypal imagery. He became associated with a post-war group of Chicago artists known as “The Monster Roster” for their collective expressionistic, existential nod to antiquity such as Cosmo Campoli, Dominic Di Meo, Leon Golub, Seymour Rososfky, and Nancy Spero.
This sculpture is an example of Social Realism, a style of art that emphasized depictions of contemporary life as a means of social or political commentary. The artist, ‘Si’ Gordon, was employed in the sculpture division of the Federal Art Project (1935-43), a Works Project Administration program that employed artists on a monthly stipend. The Federal Art Project established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned murals and sculptures for public buildings, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Great Depression.
In 1914, artist and sculptor Alfonso Iannelli came to Chicago from Los Angeles to work on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Midway Gardens. Iannelli created the famous Sprite figures, the angular, column-like figures that graced Midway’s three-acre beer garden. Iannelli and his artist wife, Margaret, moved to Chicago in 1915 and eventually settled in Park Ridge in 1920, where they maintained a studio workshop.
Miyoko Ito was an important artist in Chicago, admired by her contemporaries for her distinctive approach to painting. Her delicate, quick brush strokes and remarkable color combinations give her paintings a lively pulse. Ito was born to Japanese immigrant parents in Berkeley, California. She developed artistically under the influence of a wide range of movements and revolutions in the arts: Cubism, Bauhaus, Abstract Expressionism, and individual artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Hans Hoffman, and Paul Cezanne.
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