IAIN BAXTER&

       This post is also inspired by my trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and focuses on a man named Iain Baxter, or really I should say IAIN BAXTER& since he legally changed his name to include the capital letters and the &.  He added the & to his name because he believes that art and life are about connectivity.

Photo taken from his exhibit at MCA.

      After learning about IAIN BAXTER& and his obsession with the symbol & I decided to research it a little bit. I found that the & symbol was actually called the ampersand. The & symbol used to be the 27th letter of the alphabet so children would end saying "and, per se, and" which means "&, meaning, and." The part got mixed together to create the word ampersand. 

      Although I found learning about the creation of the & symbol interesting, I was mostly fascinated with Iain's idea about it's importance. "And" is the word that we used everyday all the time in all languages. Not only does it connect words together in the literal sense, it also connects ideas and people. I can't imagine where we'd be without this important word that often seems insignificant and small. I probably wouldn't even want to count the number of times I've used the word in this blog post, let alone how many times I say it in a day. I think it's important to recognize the little things that keep our language together like the word "and". People tend to focus on how to make a piece of writing sound good with multiple adjectives when sometimes all you need is just a simple way for everything to connect to make a good piece of writing. 

If you want more information about IAIN BAXTER& you can visit the MCA website to watch a video of him explaining his work. Click HERE

What do you think the importance of the word "and" is? How do you think you're life would be different without this word? What do you think about the & symbol connecting the world?