Chicago’s ‘Cows on Parade’ is back for July, celebrating 20-year anniversary with one last roundup
Two decades ago, Chicago got caught up in cow fever — not bovine spongiform encephalopathy, but a benign form of art-cow madness.
Craft-augmented cow statues in that summer of 1999 started up across the downtown area: a cow festooned in flowers, a cow painted in red and yellow zebra stripes, a cow tiled over like a shower stall.
One particularly clever cow, outside of Columbia College, had “HOW” stenciled on one side, “NOW” on the other. The underlying color was, of course, brown.
“Cows on Parade,” conceived as a canvas for local artists, “went crazy,” recalled Peter Hanig, the Michigan Avenue shoe-store owner whose family vacation in Switzerland the year before inspired the cow invasion. “I took people on tours. It was a crazy summer.”
Read more in the Chicago Tribune here.