“The Flight of Daedalus and Icarus” by Roger Brown, The Loop, Chicago

I’ve seen this mosaic randomly in the past but never got a chance to photograph it until Wednesday morning when I was walking back to work from the dentist. It’s above the entrance to 120 North LaSalle, which was the last skyscraper by architect Helmut Jahn to be built in Chicago. The photo was sort of hard to take because I was standing on a really thin meridian with traffic whizzing by. I wish I was more centered in front of the mosaic, but I still like it.

Kevin Nance, arts and architecture critic for the Chicago Sun Times, told Centerstage this about the mosaic and its artist:

“Flight of Daedalus and Icarus” by Roger Brown, at 120 N. LaSalle St.
It’s a mosaic piece that depicts the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, though the piece just shows father and son flying in the sky…Behind the two winged figures you see a sky that has these amazing blue pillow-shaped clouds, and then behind the clouds you see the rays of the sun coming down. It’s a marriage of traditional mosaics with Brown’s unique vision of abstract backgrounds that convey this repetitive, roiling, turbulent background. There’s something sort of obsessive here that’s very typical of Roger Brown. It’s 27 feet high and 54 feet wide and you just stand in front of it agog at the sheer beauty of it. There’s a stylized sort of Egyptian quality to his work that, when you see any image by Roger Brown, from a distance you know it’s by him.

Larger image here.