As an international student of NCC, visiting Chicago is one of my priorities. There are historical architectures, museums and great food. I was especially looking forward to seeing the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s one of the oldest and largest museums in the United States. They collect nearly 300,000 works from Ancient Greek sculptures to contemporary art.
It is impossible to see everything in one day if you are a freak of arts. First, you can recognize symbolic two lions before the museum. Most visitors are likely to take a picture with them.
After passing through the entrance hall, I recommend going downstairs to experience the Thorne Miniature Rooms. These rooms are intricately detailed. You should compare them, and notice that the miniatures fascinate everyone ranging from children to adult.
The second floor also sticks out to me. They exhibit plenty of works of well-known artists such as Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper. When I took a fine arts class in Japan, there were many opportunities to observe their creations in a textbook. Unfortunately, some of them are not allowed to export to other museums because of the artist’s requirements.
Warhol’s section is intriguing. He is best known for his pop art in producing silkscreen process, which transfers a photographic image onto a canvas.
When I learned about him, I honestly did not understand why his works had expanded the world and got popular. However, when I faced Warhol’s creations, I felt like that he did expect that pop-art would more prevail in the mass-produced world and at the same time he must have satirized the world where people don’t make efforts to grasp an implication of object but to catch up with the trend.
I believe he kept creating silkscreens to make people notice the irony in his work. Whether or not my assumption is right, the place gave me an opportunity to think about something like that, which is one of my pleasures in visiting the historical museum.
“Although I never been there, I want to watch photographs there,” Emily Mah Jia Hui, an exchange student from Japan, said. “I will visit as soon as I have free time.”
Yen Lihn Phan, a freshman from Vietnam, said, “The art that I found the most interesting is the painting named ‘Street in Venice’ … I personally love this piece because it brings a feeling of solitude and peace. I’ll definitely go back there if I have the time.”
