Last year a friend bought me a mermaid ornament for Christmas but she kept forgetting to bring it when we met for coffee. This December she had promised herself she would finally remember it but she forgot it again. Since we had met at a new coffee place near her apartment we walked over to get it. After a year I was glad to finally see what my new mermaid looked like. While I had bought a similar one with black hair in Rockport, I was glad to see the new one was a redhead and I hung her right up above the mirror but then I forgot her when I wrote the post about my new mermaids. So to rectify that here she is:
Upstairs in the Chicago Children’s Museum there is a fascinating room titled Michael’s Museum.
There is a regular sized door to the right of the small door and visitors who venture inside find more than 100 of the collections of Michael Horvich. Michael has always collected items that are “small in scale” and at first they were displayed throughout his house. When they were moved to their own room and special glass cases were constructed, the house’s guest room was renamed Michael’s Museum. In 2011 the museum moved to the Chicago Children’s Museum.
On the Michael’s Museum website Michael says that he has always been on the lookout for “small, magical, interesting, romantic, and unique items” to add to his collections which he calls “Discoverings, trinkets, curiosities, small things, or treasures” He occasionally uses the word miniatures but he doesn’t really like it. He says a lot of his small items remind him of the “olden days” of his childhood.
About collecting Michael says, “I find there is magic in numbers and if I can collect many of the same identical item, I do” A numbered list of his collections includes #93 Plastic Boxes and #100 Pencil Nubs.
His collections also include Day of the Dead items and Minature North American Indian Arts and Crafts.
And lots of tiny books.
There are so many items here. Some of them have labels indicating they are on loan from other people’s collections. One of the most fascinating to me were the small dolls on this shelf labeled “Frozen Charlottes”. According to Wikipedia they are china dolls made between c1850 to c1920. The name comes from an American folk ballad “Fair Charlotte” based on the poem “A Corpse Going to a Ball” by Seba Smith, which “tells of a young girl called Charlotte who refused to wrap up warmly to go on a sleigh ride because she did not want to cover up her party dress; she froze to death during the journey.”
I could spend hours looking at all the “tiny treasures” and I suspect many other grown ups could too. Unfortunately, you need to be accompanying a child to come to the museum and the ones I’ve attended with don’t spend much time here. Since I volunteer at the museum I can stop by on my own but I wish it was accessible to other collectors as well. Michael’s Museum does have it’s own website so it is possible to see some of the collection on line. www.michaelsmuseum.org
Most of the Christmas presents I received this year were invisibly integrated – clothes, a cookbook, a beautiful cutting board, a couch blanket, and other lovely things. I also got four mermaids – three from the same niece. One of the mermaids she gave us was on a card. The paper cutting of the lotteria card La Sirena was accompanied by two other card images – El Sol and El Gallo. Unlike my sun and mermaid collections my chicken collection is small and all but one of the chickens lives on two of the black box shelves in the hall.
So it only made sense for the card to go above this set of box shelves. I cut the card down, backed the card with purple tissue paper to match that which was behind the paper cutting, and framed it a small clip frame.
The second mermaid is a Frida Kahlo mermaid tile. I knew where she belonged right away – in the bathroom behind the sink with the other tiles. We moved a mermaid that was hanging there that wasn’t a tile and hung the new tile up.
This was a kind of “she looks good for now” situation but I knew I had to be on the lookout for another tile that would pull it all together. I can’t believe I found the perfect one last week at a Salvation Army store.
I like that she is the same kind of flat colorful tile as Frida. I think she complements the other tiles well too. We took down the seahorse tile (which being real not mythical didn’t fit in so well anyway) and the white merboy and mergirl are on hiatus (although I already have an idea where they might go). The mermaid that wasn’t really a tile moved out to the bedroom.
It was quite a surprise when we got another mermaid from our niece at a second Christmas celebration. She is cut from an aluminum can and colored with alcohol ink (according to her packaging) and we had the perfect place just waiting for her! I had hung the miniature weather vane mermaid on the left bottom shelf swirl this summer. The new mermaid fit perfectly on the right one.
And I got a mermaid tile coaster and matching cup from my brother and sister in law. They seemed to belong in the bathroom too. The cup usually sits on the tile but I photographed them so the tile is visible.
It’s always fun to figure out where the gift additions to our collections go!
We started watching House Hunters on HGTV at our younger daughter’s house while we were looking for our condo in Chicago and then we became hooked. So after we moved to Chicago and a new show premiered on HGTV called Windy City Rehab we were excited to check it out. We had watched a few episodes and when our niece who we knew liked to watch International House Hunters came to visit, we asked her if she’d like watch an episode. That episode turned out to be pretty exciting because the entire house fell down! “They didn’t brace it all!!!!! What did they expect?” my niece exclaimed. We figured they must have wanted it to fall down so we weren’t too surprised when we began to read of complaints from people (whose houses were in the same neighborhoods as the ones that were being remodeled) about the show and the cohosts HGTV personality Alison Victoria and contractor Donovan Eckhardt. It was a little more surprising when the city issued Stop Work Orders for several of the homes and when lawsuits involving both buyers and subcontractors were filed. The house with the unpaid subcontractor turned out to be in my neighborhood so of course I had to go take a look.
I have been meaning to check out the Ryan Learning Center at the Art Institute of Chicago for awhile so when we went to the Andy Warhol exhibit on Sunday I stopped by. And it turned out it is all about to be “enhanced”. One room that I think had been for the youngest children was already closed and nothing was happening in some of the studios. The Family Room was still open but I think it was scheduled to be closed the next day.
Families were building with blocks and looking at books.
An invitation to create a shadow box inspired by the exhibit “Photography + Folk Art: Looking for America in the 1930’s” was set up on the tables.
I don’t think there was a facilitator in the space (no one approached me – a grown up with no children taking pictures) but there were some families creating.
There were many completed shadow boxes hanging on the wall.
I liked these lines and clips as a way to save and display art and will be interested to see if they remain after the remodeling since it looked like there had been some which had been removed outside one of the studio classroom spaces. It will be exciting to return in a few months to see the new space.
YAP programs usually run for about 2 months but for December and early January Liz planned two different ones. First texture rubbings – such a simple idea but so much fun. We collected many items including plastic doilies and placemats (especially good were the pieces of honeycomb plastic that come under the pizza in our Friday night pizza box), fabric with texture (the museum has lots of donated upholstery swatches), and pieces of a clear pliable plastic cut into shapes. Then we supplied paper and “muffin crayons”. Muffin crayons are made by melting crayon ends in muffin tins. We supplied a recipe for these as we get lots of questions about how to make them.
One week guest artist Ione who creates prints with found texture pieces talked about her art and set up a texture area for large rubbings.
In mid December we introduced cake decorating which we had done last year and it was just as popular.
Cake Decorating will probably return next December and texture rubbing may return again this year.
While we were exploring shapes in the Young Artist program at the Chicago Children’s Museum guest artist Shawn Smith came to introduce his mural shape characters and help guests create their own out of foam shapes.
While others are taking down their Christmas decorations those of us who celebrate Christmas well into January are leaving ours up. My husband and his siblings take turns hosting and this year as with many others we will be celebrating on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. Two years ago we celebrated in Maryland and I took these photos of my sister in law’s Angel tree.
One of the highlights of Christmas in Chicago is the opportunity to see more of the James and Emilia Govan Creche Collection at LUMA (the Loyola University Museum of Art). The collection comprises more than 500 collected and commissioned Nativity scenes from around the world.
Since we also have quite a Nativity collection several years ago my husband bought me a beautiful book called Art of the Creche: Nativities from Around the World for Christmas. The first time we went to the LUMA exhibit we realized that we were seeing the Nativities from the book.
The Govans donated their collection to LUMA in 2009 and James Govan continues to aquire or commission and donate new pieces. Each year the museum features a portion of the collection. There were less displayed this year than in other years but I think they were all ones I hadn’t seen before. The Chicago Nativity was particularly fun, I love the little angels flitting around on the skyscrapers.
I think this one from Kenyan artist Daudi Makungu was my favorite this year. Although with over 100 on display it’s hard to pick just one.
I have always made my own Christmas cards. At first I made linoleum blocks and printed each one but in 1983 I began creating with a partner – a copier! So now if I make a block print I only make one and then I copy it. I don’t just use block prints though, I’ve used pen, pencil, and marker as well as cut paper and collage. With my limited artistic ability I usually adapt or alter images I happen on or search for. I often attach embroidery thread to my cards turning them into ornaments which many recipients save and display. The other day I received three photos over text or email featuring them.
Collections and Other Stuff I Like 