Uncategorized – Page 107

Huron. Light.

Tawas Point Light.

At Tawas Point State Park, Iosco County, Michigan.

American tree sparrow (Spizelloides arborea), at Tawas Point State Park on Lake Huron, Iosco County, Michigan.

Cloud ceiling.

My favorite Chicago hotel is the Blackstone, with the green-clad roof at the left in this photo. In a city of giant buildings it is only 300 feet tall (90 m), so the clouds on this day were very low indeed. The photo was taken from Adler Planetarium.

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.

fragment from the poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time” by Robert Frost. From the collection A Further Range, 1937.

Detail of Water Falls from my Breast to the Sky, a site-specific installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago by Ernesto Neto, 2017. The work is made of cotton voile crochet, cotton knit fabric, cotton rope, stones, stockings, lavender, wood, polyurethane foam, and painted bowls, and is suspended in a stairwell through three museum floors.

Blue Among Yellow and Red by Alexander Calder, 1963. Fabricated of sheet metal, paint, and steel wire.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Details of A Century of Progress, an acrylic rug designed by Jessica Campbell, 2018. The rug is displayed on the gallery floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where visitors trample the art daily.

Detail shots of Suar a Camisa (Working Up a Sweat) by Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade, 2014. The installation comprises a collection of 120 shirts negotiated with workers that are hung on wooden supports. At the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

From the exhibit didactic panel: “This grouping of worn t-shirts resembles a public assembly, a protest, or a crowd of workers. To make this installation, Andrade approached male laborers working in the streets and fields of Brazil’s Nordeste and asked them to exchange shirts on the spot; a public and subtly homoerotic invitation. … Here, the workers are absent, but their collective presence is felt nevertheless; the unwashed shirts retain the stains and smells of their original owners’ bodies.”

Kestrel news: I returned from my Great Lakes trip just in time to see the baby kestrel fledge. I spotted Junior hiding in the Mexican bird of paradise bush in the back yard while his parents kept watch overhead.

Hopping and half-flying is demanding work for a young raptor. I caught him dozing after all his exertions in the bottom photo.

You can see more of my kestrel photos here.

Etymology note: Scientifically speaking, American kestrels are named Falco sparverius. Falco because they are superlative raptors, and sparverius because of their dietary affinity for small birds, like sparrows, though I think the bird carcass in the top photo is more likely the remains of a dove.