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Our Graduate Seminar class, which meets all-day every Friday (normally to view work we have been making during the week) is trying to switch things up a bit. This week we went on a field trip.

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The Art Institute has a show up titled Light Years, and is about the conceptual movement in photography, or actually the use of photography in the conceptual art movement of the 70s. I had already attended the show on the first day back for one of my other classes, but this time we were going to be escorted by the curator of the exhibition and some professors from SAIC. [flickr id=”6790813528″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”original” group=”” align=”none”]

We spent about an hour and a half in the exhibit listening to the discussion of the curator, and it was nice, I’d say better then a standard tour. It was also nice having already seen the show once. Having discussed it in another class, I had some background and could grasp a lot of what the discussion was about. Also, we moved quite quickly through the exhibit, so there wasn’t a lot of time to stop and look.

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After that we had lunch as a class at a nearby cafe. Then it was off the Museum of Contemporary Art. They are currently having a show about the 80s, which was a nice follow up to the show about the 70s that we had just seen. I had been wanting to go to this show for one piece in particular– Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women. It is a constant in contemporary art history, and in our theory class we had been reading Michael Fried, who is a great lover of Wall’s. Because of all this, and the fact that I had never actually seen a Jeff Wall piece in person, I was excited to go.

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That was it for our Seminar for the day. We left when we were done looking. It was a nice change of pace.