Wanderlust: A Walk Through the City, from Holabird and Root to The Kelpies

Wanderlust, by Boyan Marinov (click images for larger view)

Boyan Marinov's Wanderlust sculpture at Clark and Aldine Streets is part of this year's Chicago Sculpture Exhibit, which has placed over 20 works from Bucktown to Lakeview.   It was the perfect starting point for a walk of discovery along Chicago's lakefront on the kind of beautiful day that can make you forget that the season of warmth and flowering is drawing to a close.

The Mandel Brothers warehouse, 3254 N. Halsted, Holabird and Roche, 1903.

This fall Chicago has one of the greatest displays of art ever.  Not only is there the Studio/Gang Designed Expo Chicago 2012, next week at Navy Pier, not only is there the Chicago Sculpture Exhibit, but from October 4th through the 6th, Chicago will be host to the International Sculpture Center's 2012 conference.  Leading up to that event, Chicago Sculpture International is finishing placing well over 50 sculptures along the lakefront from Grant Park to Belmont Harbor, where the work above was found.

You can see a comprehensive survey - with much better photos -  of all the riches currently in place on Jyoti Srivrastava's  indispensable website, Public Art in Chicago.

. . . Diversey Harbor.

. . . outside the Lincoln Park Conservatory

. . . and inside. (Sinuous, by Sheila Ganch)

Along the Lakefront promenade, near the Museum campus, we were lucky enough to encounter sculptor Suzanne Horwitz polishing up her striking work, Nautilus.

We finished up with Andy Scott's shimmering Kelpies, which came all the way from Scotland just to look out over Lake Michigan.  See more pictures here, and read the full story here.

We also had an an interesting encounter with Emanuel Swedenborg, Daniel Burnham's great influence, but the more I looked into the strangely-placed sculpture, the more interesting the story became, so I'm going to cover it tomorrow.

Runners and Sculptures at the end of a late summer day

click images for larger view (recommended) - sculpture by Christopher Newman

view the entire portfolio after the break . . .

Shimmering in the late summer sun: giant Kelpies land on Chicago's Lakefront

click images for larger view

When we first wrote about Andy Scott's The Kelpies last March, the 10-foot-high maquettes for the 100-foot-high sculptures being erected by the River Carron in Scotland were on display at Edinburgh Airport.

The two horse heads, fabricated of mosaics of interconnected steel plates, have now made their way to Chicago, to the great lawn that separates the Field Museum from the lakefront promenade.

 

 

Even at one-tenth scale, they're pretty spectacular, and there's a small steel human figure on one of the bases to give you an even better idea of the size of the actual sculptures.  The maquettes are part of this year's Chicago Sculpture International, and are expected to be in place for the next twelve months,

You can read all about how the sculptures were fabricated, how they will be inhabited, and the myth of Kelpies as mythical beasts haunting Scottish waterways, luring riders onto their backs, only to be plunged to the river bottom and drowned (consider taking the Wendella instead) - all in our original post, here.

Step back a few paces and see them confidently take their place among the icon towers of Chicago's skyline.