Chicago Street Art

yesterday, with the autumn sun glaring through our morning window, mindy and i decided we needed to get the hell out of lafayette for a day.  so we made an impromptu trip to chicago, our urban playland of the midwest.  i don't hate lafayette.  it's just boring and bland sometimes.  culture is lacking here.  but then, welcome to indiana.  it was columbus day (whatever the hell that means, i guess we're all supposed to celebrate by taking what isn't ours and proclaiming it to be) so traffic wasn't too bad up I-65.  we rolled into chinatown, parked, picked up some goodies at the chinese herb shop, then went for dim sum.  mindy is just like her dad when it comes to dim sum:  relax, have some tea, eat slowly, and order most of the menu.  but there were only 2 of us, so we had a huge table full of tiny plates.  we ate our fill, or a bit more than our fill, then packed the rest up to go (mindy finished it off for dinner after we got home).

after dim sum we had the intention of going to look for some new spaces to show in chi, so we headed toward the UIC campus and the chicago arts district on halsted.  when we were here last month we passed some pretty cool looking graffiti through here and it got me interested.  so once we found most everything closed for the holiday (or just for monday), we decided to scavenger hunt it out.  we found that the pilsen neighborhood is prime location in chicago.  there is very little in the way of good street art in chi, but we finally found some.

there's a bunch of cool stuff through the main neighborhood street on 18th.  and on 16th, along the interstate embankments there is a whole bunch of new street art.  we found GATS from oakland, the yok and sheryo from nyc, among others.

then we worked our way toward town and back toward the the icy and sot piece i saw up on the roof top last time.  we parked and wandered and didn't find much in the meatpacking district, but we did find an awesome cls piece.

detail of the CLS piece. we couldn't get behind the fence to get a picture of the entire piece.

it was a fun little pointless excursion, but we needed to get out of lafayette.  and while we couldn't jump a plane to somewhere out of the midwest, chicago will do for now.