Artist: Ken Fandell (American, born 1971)
Title: The Sky Above My Home (10/7/2002–6/14/2003, Chicago, Illinois)
Date: 2003
Medium: Inkjet print on paper
Dimensions: 58 1/4 in x 105 in
Credit Line: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of Peter Norton, 2016.4.9

From October 8 to November 9, 2025, Ken Fandell’s photograph The Sky Above My Home (10/7/2002–6/14/2003, Chicago, Illinois) will be on view in The Living Room at The Block Museum of Art. The large-scale image immerses viewers in a striking montage of skies captured by Fandell during his time living in Chicago.

Ken Fandell (American, b. 1971) is an artist and teacher whose practice primarily centers on photography, but engages with a variety of mediums, including drawing, video, and sculpture. He currently serves as Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson Chair in Arts and the Humanities at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. Fandell has deep roots in Chicago: he was born in Evanston, received his BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and his MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and taught for twelve years at SAIC, where he was chair of the photography department. Fandell emphasizes “intuition and contemplation” as the center of his practice and teaching. “It starts when you let your heart and your head work in conjunction with the environment around you,” he remarked in a 2016 interview with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Sky Above My Home (10/7/2002–6/14/2003, Chicago, Illinois) is a composite image, blending together photographs Fandell took of the sky above his home in Chicago each day over a period of eight months. Fandell’s camera points upward, mimicking a human gaze trained up to the sky. The montaged images result in a bold composition of bright blue sky and swirling, brushstroke-like clouds. While the image appears at first glance to capture one still sky, a close examination reveals changes in space and time as Fandell took each photograph: spots of pale pink and orange from different sunsets, or a rainbow peeking through in the center left.

With no characteristics to identify its precise location in space, The Sky Above My Home (10/7/2002–6/14/2003, Chicago, Illinois) seems as though it could’ve been taken anywhere in the world, inviting viewers to contemplate the universality of the sky and nature. The image also collapses a long stretch of time into a single snapshot, reflecting a fascination with temporality that is echoed across Fandell’s work.

This photograph was the centerpiece of Fandell’s first solo exhibition at Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley, California, in 2003. Titled More Oscillations Between Infinity and Proximity (Girlfriends, Sneakers, Basketball, Pizza, Martinis, the Sky, Transcendence and My Place in the Cosmos), the exhibition explored the relationship between daily life and grand philosophical questions. Fandell uses subjects ranging from celestial phenomena to bodily functions to probe connections between our urgent daily needs and the timeless questions posed by beauty, spiritual transcendence, and the sublime. (Traywick Contemporary)

Fandell has returned to the subject of the sky throughout his career, producing large-scale composite photographs in cities such as New York and Asheville. At the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2004, his exhibition included Days and Nights, Dawns and Dusks, North and South, East and West, Mine and Yours (2007), two monumental composite sky photographs shown alongside video sequences of the images used to construct them. Later, in The Sky Above Here (Asheville, NC) (2013), he extended this project to a new geography, underscoring how place and perspective shape our view of the infinite. The Block Museum also holds a second Fandell work, Untitled Study No. 10 (2005), a smaller photograph that may represent one of the many images created in preparation for these large composites.

Artists have long turned to the sky as a source of inspiration. The English painter John Constable once wrote, “It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key-note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.” (Kornhauser) Fandell’s work builds on this tradition, continuing a centuries-old fascination with the sky as a site of spiritual, aesthetic, and philosophical meaning. His photographs reflect both scientific observation and poetic contemplation.

–Contributed by Llewyn Blossfeld, Curatorial Associate and Madeleine Giaconia, Communications Coordinator

Bibliography

Fandell, Ken. About. KenFandell.com, 2025. https://kenfandell.com/about.

—. Skies. KenFandell.com, 2025. https://kenfandell.com/skies.

Grace, Kyle. “‘PROFile: Ken Fandell.’” HSA Blog, 21 Apr. 2020. https://www.hmc.edu/hsa/2020/04/21/profile-ken-fandell-by-kyle-grace/.

Harvey Mudd College, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts. “Ken Fandell.” https://www.hmc.edu/hsa/faculty-staff/fandell/.

Kornhauser, Elizabeth. “‘The Soul of All Scenery’: Thomas Cole’s Clouds.” Perspectives – Met Museum Blog, 16 May 2018. https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/thomas-cole-clouds-oxbow.

MCA Chicago. “MCA – UBS 12 x 12: New Artists/New Work: Ken Fandell.” Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 3 Dec. 2004. https://mcachicago.org/exhibitions/2004/ken-fandell.

Schmidt Center Gallery. Shared Space: A New Era: Photographs from the Bank of America Collection (Media Packet). Florida Atlantic University, 1 Feb. 2020. https://www.fau.edu/artsandletters/galleries/2019-2020-exhibitons/index-shared-space/shared-space-media-packet.pdf.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “SAIC Alumni Profile: Ken Fandell (BFA 1993).” YouTube, 10 Feb. 2016, video, 2:44. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1eFyH_nyR0.

Traywick Contemporary. “Ken Fandell – Traywick Contemporary.” Traywick Contemporary, 2 Nov. 2024. https://www.traywick.com/artist/ken-fandell/.