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Chicago’s most famous metallic legume is back on display this week after months of maintenance work. In celebration of its return and Millennium Park’s upcoming 20th anniversary , here’s everything you need to know about the adored public art. Whose idea was "The Bean?" In 1999, to prepare for the highly-anticipated opening of Millennium Park, city organizers asked dozens of artists from around the world to submit proposals for public art.

Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (the official name of "The Bean") was chosen. Kapoor, a world-renowned British sculptor, originally wanted to model the art piece off of liquid mercury, hence the reflective metal exterior. Featuring an “omphalos” (Greek for “navel”), the concave chamber at the center of the structure, "The Bean" is said to act as a gate between realms and allows visitors to walk directly under the massive artwork.



In explaining his vision to the Chicago Tribune in 2004, the artist said, " What I wanted to do was to make a work that would deal with the incredible skyline of Chicago and the open sky and the lake but then also be a kind of gate. You know, the tradition of public sculpture is for the gate, the archway, the square to flow within [the landscape] rather than be an object decorating it." Kapoor also considered Chicago-specific geography while designing Cloud Gate .

“Chicago is a very vertical city,” Kapoor told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2017 . “I wanted to make a horizontal sculpture that would draw i.

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