Chicago: Renzo-Piano Vista
Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano, the 264,000 square foot Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago makes it the second largest art museum in the United States. The Bluhm Family Terrace, pictured here, affords a spectacular confluence of architecture with views of Millennium Park and the surrounding city, and provides space for rotating installations. The five sculptures shown here constitute part of "We The People", artist Danh Vo's long-term project to reconstruct the Statue of Liberty on a 1:1 scale. The scattered fragments remain connected to this universal symbol but emphasize the abstract nature of the concept of freedom. Vo's decision to recreate only the statue's thin copper skin—at its actual thickness of two pennies—reveals the monument's material and conceptual fragility, and by extension, the malleability of its meaning.
Uploaded on March 17, 2013