This day in the windy city began with a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art(MCA), which houses a special exhibit by Takashi Murakami, “The Octopus Eats its Own Leg”. One of his early works on display is a large multi panel textured canvas covered with ultramarine, reputedly a very expensive pigment made from grinding the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli. The description of the painting, whose title I did not write down, relates that Murakami painted it after getting his first major commission, to celebrate his ‘success’ by indulging in this lush, vibrant, almost excessive, blue paintfest, just because he could now afford it.

Filled with poppy, colorful imagery, Arhat, mythical Japanese sea creatures and DOB’s , I decided to walk down Michigan ave, from the MCA to the AIC, the Art Institute of Chicago. I had time, and the weather was steady-gorgeous, blue skies, temps in the seventies, slight breeze. A conveniently posted city map indicated I could travel along the lakeshore and therefore ditch the high end commercial strip of Michigan ave. Nuff said, any action that ditches anything commercial is bound to be a good idea.

The first color that struck me was red, because of some sign or other, and the Murakami reproductions adorning the exterior of the MCA. At the time, they seemed dominantly red. Thankfully, a mural painted on the lakeshore end of a pedestrian tunnel reminded me that in Chicago, it had to be blues.

“Oh! Baby don’t you want to go

Oooh! Baby don’t you want to go

Back to the land of California, my sweet home Chicago…”

Sweet Home Chicago, Robert Johnson

listen to Robert Johnson’s version of this classic blues paean to the Great Migration, a chapter in American history described by Isabel Wilkerson in “The Warmth of Other Suns”:

“Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.

…

In Chicago alone, the black population rocketed from 44,103 (just under three percent of the population) at the start of the Migration to more than one million at the end of it. By the turn of the twenty-first century, blacks made up a third of the city’s residents, with more blacks living in Chicago than in the entire state of Mississippi.”

The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson

Here’s a more contemporary rendition. , from a time when presidents had class. Feels like a billion years ago.

Walking Project 021_chicago blues pt1 from chris worland on Vimeo.