{"product_id":"lions-of-the-art-institute","title":"Lions of the Art Institute","description":"\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eADDRESS: 111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL\u003cbr\u003eSCULPTOR: Edward Kemeys\u003cbr\u003eYEAR BUILT: 1894\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou walk past them every day. You might have stood between them for a picture. You have seen them wearing Christmas wreaths, Cubs jerseys, or surgical masks during a pandemic. You think you know them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou don't.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey have been standing there since 1894. Two bronze lions on Michigan Avenue, flanking the grand staircase of the Art Institute of Chicago. For over 130 years, they have watched everything: the construction of a skyline, the fury of blizzards, the smoke of protests, the eruption of championship celebrations. They watched the city burn its way through the 20th century and rebuild. They watched it do it again.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd still they stand. Unimpressed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is what bronze does. It outlasts everything you think is permanent.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMost people who sculpt lions have never seen one outside a cage.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEdward Kemeys was different. Born in 1843, trained by nobody, self-taught in the way that matters most: by going where the thing actually lives. He spent years in the American West. He lived among the Crow people. He befriended trappers. He watched animals move in their native ground, not behind iron bars. And when a specimen died, he dissected it. He mapped the musculature the way a surgeon maps a body, not because he was morbid, but because he understood something most artists refuse to accept: you cannot make something real until you know what it is made of.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis lions are not decorative. They are anatomical. Every tendon is correct. Every posture is observed. He signed each pedestal with a wolf-head totem, his personal mark, the symbol of the animal that first revealed his calling to him in Central Park when he was still a young man working for the engineering corps.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKemeys gave them no names. He gave them personalities.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe south lion is \"in an attitude of defiance.\" Head raised to full height. Mouth closed. Front legs even. Watching something in the distance that has earned its full attention. Kemeys said this was the hardest pose he ever attempted. In captivity, lions almost never raise their heads above their bodies. It is a posture of the wild, reserved for the moment of real alertness, when something far away demands to be taken seriously.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe north lion is \"on the prowl.\" Head up and turning. Mouth open. Weight shifting forward. Kemeys described him as having \"his back up,\" ready to roar and spring.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne lion confronts the world. The other calculates it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is not a coincidence. This is Chicago.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA persistent story says these lions are bronze recasts of the plaster statues from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. It is a satisfying story. It connects the lions to the greatest moment in Chicago's civic mythology, to the White City, to the Fair that remade the American imagination.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is also false.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 1893 exposition lions were made of staff, a mixture of plaster and hemp fiber designed to last six months. They were the work of sculptors A. Phimister Proctor and Theodore Baur, not Kemeys. Their tails pointed straight back and down. Look at the south lion on Michigan Avenue. His tail sweeps in a different arc entirely. The anatomical difference is not subtle. It is a sculptor's signature, written in bronze.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Art Institute lions were a specific commission, a gift from Florence Lathrop Field in memory of her husband Henry, cast in what the records called \"everlasting bronze\" by the American Bronze Founding Company, placed on Michigan Avenue on May 10, 1894. They were never temporary. They were never repurposed. They were made for exactly where they stand.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe myth persists because people want a story that ties beautiful things together. But the truth is more interesting than the myth. Kemeys made something original. Something that belongs to no other moment but this one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2022, conservators lifted the south lion from its pedestal. Under the plinth, workers found two Indian Head cents, placed there by someone whose name is lost to history, a small deliberate act of devotion from over a century ago.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInside the bronze shells of both lions, there are two time capsules. One from the museum's early years. One was placed during the 2001 restoration. Both are still sealed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNobody knows what is in them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is what the lions are, beyond sculpture and symbol. They are vaults. They hold Chicago's secrets in their hollow bodies, standing on Michigan Avenue as the city rushes past, carrying something no one has seen since it was placed there.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe conservation work also revealed something else: every few decades, the bronze must be steam-cleaned, the oxidation managed, and a protective wax applied to protect it against Chicago's winters. The patina you see, that deep green that contrasts so perfectly against the limestone, is not neglect. It is 130 years of weather, held in place and maintained by people who understand that some things are worth protecting.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1985, for the first time, someone put oversized helmets on the lions for the Chicago Bears' Super Bowl run. The city loved it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSince then, they have worn the red of the Bulls, the feathers of the Blackhawks, the blue of the Cubs. In December, they wear six-foot evergreen wreaths that take a crew, a bucket lift, and a 5:30 am start on the Friday after Thanksgiving to install. Each wreath weighs 250 pounds, wired to an iron frame, sprayed with antidesiccant, and cured under tarps for days before it goes up. The bows are sourced from a car dealership because nothing else is large enough.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis tradition confounds people who care about the dignity of art. It should not.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA 10,000-pound bronze lion wearing a Chicago Cubs jersey is not a desecration. It is a declaration. It says: this belongs to us. Not to the institution, not to history, not to a catalog entry. To the city. To everyone who climbs those steps and everyone who doesn't. The Art Institute is not a palace. It is a museum, open to the public, built by immigrants, laborers, architects, and artists who believed that a city could be something more than commerce.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe costumes are Chicagoans talking back to the monument. The monument, as always, remains unmoved. But it wears the jersey.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen the Chicago Cubs won the World Series in 2016, after 108 years without a championship, people did not go to Grant Park first. They went to the lions.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThink about what that means.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the moment of the city's most profound collective release, people walked to two bronze animals made by a self-taught sculptor in 1894 and stood with them. Not because they had to. Because it felt right. Because the lions are part of the emotional geography of Chicago in the same way the lake is, the same way the elevated tracks are. They mark something. They are where you go when something real has happened, and you need to be somewhere that has been standing long enough to hold it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMeet me at the lions. No further explanation needed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDefiance and Prowl. Kemeys' words were more prophetic than he knew.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eChicago is a city built on defiance. It was built on swampy ground that engineers said could not support a city. It burned to the ground in 1871 and was rebuilt in twenty years into the most architecturally innovative skyline on earth. It was crushed by economic collapses and came back. It endures winters that are not metaphorical.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd it prowls. It has always prowled. Restless, calculating, moving forward with the particular ambition of a city that knows it has something to prove.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe lions do not guard a palace. They guard an idea: that a city of big shoulders deserves a temple of culture, and that the temple belongs to everyone who climbs the stairs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey face outward, not inward. They are not looking at the art behind them. They are looking at you.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNext time you walk past them, look at the south lion's head, raised to a height lions only reach in the wild. Look at the north lion's weight shifting forward. Look at the wolf-head totem Kemeys pressed into the base, his signature, the mark of a man who learned his craft from the animal itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese are not decorations.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey are 130 years of bronze patience, standing in defiance, perpetually on the prowl, holding the city's secrets in their hollow bodies, wearing its jerseys, bearing its weather.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey are as much Chicago as steel and stone and sky.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Igor Menaker Fine Art","offers":[{"title":"MATTED \/ 08x10","offer_id":51072542638358,"sku":null,"price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"MATTED \/ 16x20","offer_id":51072542671126,"sku":null,"price":125.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 16x16","offer_id":51072542703894,"sku":null,"price":200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 24x24","offer_id":51072542736662,"sku":null,"price":450.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 32x32","offer_id":51072542769430,"sku":null,"price":800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FRAMED \/ 44x44","offer_id":51072542802198,"sku":null,"price":2200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"PHOTO \/ 24x24","offer_id":51072542834966,"sku":null,"price":325.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"PHOTO \/ 32x32","offer_id":51072542867734,"sku":null,"price":525.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"PHOTO \/ 44x44","offer_id":51072542900502,"sku":null,"price":1450.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"SPLIT \/ 60x60","offer_id":51072542933270,"sku":null,"price":3950.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"SPLIT \/ 90x90","offer_id":51072542966038,"sku":null,"price":8750.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"SPLIT \/ 120x120","offer_id":51072542998806,"sku":null,"price":14950.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1306\/7343\/files\/LionsoftheArtInstitutecopy.jpg?v=1772505633","url":"https:\/\/www.menaker.com\/products\/lions-of-the-art-institute","provider":"Igor Menaker Fine Art","version":"1.0","type":"link"}