Chicago!

The week after classes ended I had the opportunity to travel to Chicago for a small focus group project and while there of course I visited some of the city's memorials!  Several were just down the street from my hotel such as the State Street bridge across the Chicago River that memorializes those who fought at Bataan and Corregidor and the lovely Vietnam Memorial Park.  Chicago claims this memorial is the largest outside of Washington.

The most stunning memorial I was able to view however took a small trek.  On one afternoon I was joined by a few of my group members who were interested in my project and so after our architectural boat tour we headed on foot down Michigan Avenue.  We walked and walked all the way to 18th Street and Indiana to the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum which houses a most unique sculpture that I was intensely interested in viewing.  I must say we barely arrived before closing and almost missed the small museum building; I decided to walk into one of the businesses on the street to ask where it might be and as I reached for the door handle -- voila!  the Museum name was on the door!    The museum has lost much of its funding and shrunk to only comprise the third floor of the building. 

The sculpture is composed of individual dog tags engraved with the name of each of the U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and nurses who lost their lives in the Vietnam War!  The tags are then hung as a group in the foyer ceiling of the small museum.

 Since my honors students use engraved dog tags for our campus Afghanistan/Iraq War Memorial, I know how labor intensive and time consuming this can be and our memorial only contains around 4000 tags.  This sculpture took over 2 years to create with the artists engraving tags eight hours a day for five days a week - wow!  It is a stunny sight I must say. I also purchased a small poster of the sculpture.