Four Pictures of Summer

What other season is associated with prolonged freedom from work and school? Sure, there is a sense of play associated with winter, at least in places lucky enough to have snow. But there’s no way it can compete with the long shimmering days of summer, where even the light seems hesitant to leave.

And what about that light? All that sun. It’s bright and hot and falls on the landscape. It oppresses as it blesses. Things can’t help but grow and transform. It permeates our sense of place and being. And it burns our skin, if you’re careless. You have to pay attention.

Thanks to summer, you have the time.

Here are four artworks that capture and hold fast that elusive and precious summer sense.

serious play

I was born with baseball fever.

Raised on the North Side of Chicago in the ’80s with a baseball-loving family deliriously devoted to our “loveable losers,” my parents were not shy about pulling me and my brother out of school for an afternoon Cubs game. So it’s basically my genetic obligation to equate Norman Rockwell’s The Dugout with summer.

Although Rockwell was depicting a game at the Boston Braves’ park, he hit the nostalgic nerve that’s centered on our forlorn Cubbies—their caps askew, the “Chicago” of their road jerseys frowning along with them—while the home fans jeer with joy. It’s a perfect representation of the anguish of many longtime Cubs fans. But it’s more than the loss. It’s baseball. Through the oil painting’s electric, magical light (especially in person), I can feel the summer sun, smell the freshly cut grass, and hear the buzzing crowd. I feel myself traverse the Wrigley Field concourse and emerge from the darkness to look out at the bright, blue summer sky over a magnificent manicured lawn.

It’s summertime in the city. Let’s play some ball.

—Meg Fertig, associate director, Internal Communications, Marketing and Communications

a well-lit past

Summer, for me, looks like growing up in Southern California—and Hockney’s American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) feels uncannily familiar.

It’s the diffusion of the light, that bright, unwavering sun that leaves nowhere to hide. I also recognize my grandparents—their midcentury modern home filled with objects that felt important, collected and curated, and the quiet way we’d spend time together. Sitting outside, everything a little too composed, the air warm and unmoving, conversations unfolding slowly.

What I see in the painting isn’t just a season but a feeling: that particular kind of summer where time stretches. Summer looks like sunlight on familiar places—and the people who define them.

—Court Tan, director, Annual Giving

heldfast

After the long test of winter,
after the gray patience of rainy spring,
Chicago remembers
what it has been waiting for all year.

Summer reminds me of paperweights:
millefiori, a thousand flowers.

Lining the streets, the farmers markets burst, the colors so vivid.
Glass pulled and stretched,
cut and gathered,
carefully arranged by dedicated, patient hands.

An abundant chance to play,
to rest, to wander without edges,
to soften into the day
and truly stop to smell the roses.

My take is personal,
a life shaped in a glass studio,
where summer arrives
like a slow, intentional exhale
through the blowpipe.

So too with summer:
a season assembled where hard work meets play,
long, steamy days, glassy glimmers near the water, laughter drifting through open windows,

until suddenly
we are holding something beautiful
in the palm of our hands.

—Katie Barko, senior educator, Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Learning Center

still in Flight

We do not see real life except by its reflection.
—Constantin Brancusi

If summer is brightness, Golden Bird is a torch.

A simplicity lacking no complexity. Momentum, instantaneous and kinetic. A form almost amorphous. Brancusi arrived in Paris on foot, walking across Europe, over 2,000 kilometers from Romania. Just years later he walked into, and out of, Rodin’s looming shadow, realizing that within it “nothing grows.” Leaving him with The Kiss. 

Brancusi’s birds consist of nearly 30 works across 30 years, charting a protracted study in form pivotal to modern art’s foundational aesthetic and definition. In her poem titled after this work, a coy Mina Loy aptly describes Golden Bird as an “incandescent curve.” 

A stillness while in flight, hovering midair. At equilibrium with the wind at its face, relative to us unmoved, the world rushing by. The surface hovers, an imprint of an aura, or a remainder. The afterglow, imbued by the maker himself. As he put it, 

“It is not the birds I sculpt, it is the flights.”

—William FitzPatrick, carpenter, Trade Shops

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