Flamingo - Alexander Calder

The Flamingo sculpture by Alexander Calder rises over a modernist plaza in downtown Chicago, and its guide starts with the parade the city threw for its 1974 unveiling, Calder himself riding in on a circus wagon. It traces his lifelong love of play back to a miniature circus he built by hand in 1920s Paris, and the government commission that asked him to fill this stark black plaza with something against the glass and steel towers by Mies van der Rohe. Walk beneath the arcing steel legs rather than just looking up at them from the sidewalk.