The UGA grad students closed out their trip to Chicago with a field trip. Our destination was not a journalistic one. In the words of our fearless leader, Pat Thomas, we needed to get a little culture before departing a blustery Windy City-- a place that is under the mistaken impression that tulips can make 57 degrees feel like spring.
After breakfast and one last glimpse of the exhibits at the Association of Health Care Journalists meeting, we grabbed a cab to the Art Institute of Chicago. There we saw a fabulous Matisse exhibit. It focused on his transformation during the World War I era from impressionist to cubist. Or at least that's my summary of it.
And while the works of this great French master were absolutely fabulous, the exhibit I'll probably remember longer featured the work of William Eggleston. His photographic record of the Deep South in the 1960s and 1970s brought back memories of my childhood in south Georgia.
In addition to his main works in Tennessee, Mississippi, and New Mexico, Eggleston shot in and around Plains in the days before Jimmy Carter won the presidency in November 1976. I grew up just 40 miles from there. Seeing the old cars, mud puddles, and rundown buildings made me think of how little we had for so long in the South--and of how we kept so many in poverty and what amounted to indentured servitude for scores of years. Sad times really, when you think about it.
Katie and I are at O'Hare now waiting to board our delayed flight to Atlanta. Time to wrap it up and post this last blog from AHCJ. It was indeed a great time in Chicago!
Artists, scientists, journalists -- we're all asking same questions. Eggleston and HMJ students overlap in striking ways, as you noted, though none of you has written about health risks of getting naked with guns in motel rooms. Maybe next year. Idea for tax reform: art museum admissions should be deductible for writers. Lunch, too.
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