Depths of winter to the golden state

My time in Boston had been a solid introduction to the North American winter, but a week in Chicago and Milwaukee showed me what cold is really all about.  Temperatures ranged from -12 in the daytime to -17 at night, pictures here are of the beach by Lake Michigan where ten years before I had spent a sweltering summer’s day, the waves now blocks of ice.  Early on, I made the crucial error of failing to wear a thermal layer under my jeans and I could feel the wind searing into my skin. In spite of this and other new sensations such as frozen eyebrows, it was rather an exhilarating encounter with the elements.

                                 

lake view from the tunnel

The train ride to Milwaukee offered a glimpse of Illinois and Wisconsin beyond the cities and a thick blanket of snow covered the ground as far as the eye could see.  The Milwaukee Art Museum has a spectacular new building on the shores of Lake Michigan, by far the most unusual museum architecture I had seen, with huge wings which are raised and lowered every day.  It is connected to the original museum building by a space-ship-like tunnel from which the horizon was barely visible between the grey of the lake and the sky. 

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Piranesi and Cinderella

The museum collection was curated in a variety of traditional and innovative displays.  A temporary exhibition which was proving exceptionally popular with visitors of all ages showcased the work of the Disney and Pixar animation studios and in particular how they drew their inspiration from works of art.  Featuring films from Sleeping Beauty and Fantasia to The Incredibles and Finding Nemo, the curators installed prints, sculptures, drawings and paintings from the collection alongside the animators’ sketches and models which clearly demonstrated how the animators referred to these works with both reverence and good humour.


At the end of the Milwaukee visit I spent some time with the new intake of teenage interns, hearing their thoughts on the MAM and the use of museums and then fielded questions on topics from careers in the arts to Dr Who (appearing like a pop culture dinosaur when confessing that the last whole episode I watched was during the Sylvester McCoy era...)

There is too much to say about Chicago and its important buildings and museums to do them justice here. Instead, picking up a thread from an earlier post about quasi-religious retail spaces, when walking to my hotel, I passed a home furnishings outlet of Bloomingdales and double-took when I spotted Arabic inscribed around the entranceway.  Stepping back it was possible to see pointed domes on the roof, and poly-lobed arches and geometric patterns decorating the building’s facades.  Further investigation revealed this to be the ‘Medinah Temple’ – built in the Moorish style in the early twentieth century by Chicago architects as an auditorium.  Discussion later with an Arabic-speaking friend revealed that the script was a repeating phrase praising Allah featured, for example, throughout the Alhambra.  According to the Wikipedia page, it had fantastic acoustics - several significant classical recordings were made there during the 20th century – but it was converted into a department store in the early 2000s. Photographs weren’t permitted inside unfortunately as it had a wonderful large central dome visible from the furniture section on the top level and ornate designs throughout with the former stage hidden behind a gold curtain and cross-crossed by escalators. Although it wasn’t unusual in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries for performance spaces to be built in Orientalist styles, the conversion into a shop gave a new meaning to me of a 'shopping Mecca'.

'Levitated mass' in LACMA grounds

Then the final stop and a leap from -17 to +17 in California, the warm breeze a wonderful welcome to the Pacific coast.  I headed straight to LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) for one of their Evenings for Educators, a programme which has become an institution amongst the local teaching community and is now in its 32^nd year.  It was a beautiful evening, buffet dinner served outside to the hundreds of attendees – spending more than five minutes stationary in the open air unimaginable a few hours earlier in the Midwest.  The Stanley Kubrick exhibition was one of the big attractions of the evening and it was brilliant, combining his annotated scripts with set photographs, costumes, storyboards, set-designs, poster-designs and sketches.  This final museum visit was also memorable for spotting an A-list celebrity leaving the exhibition as I arrived, a sprinkling of movie stardust to mark the end of a stimulating, busy and extremely valuable trip.