By Mack Trapp
The Art Institute of Chicago sponsored some amazing educational trips. These were not just for big donors, they included more often members who had put hours of work into the AIC support groups and fund raising for the AIC. The trips were great due to the planning and leadership of a fellow named Bill Hurst, an independent guide and expert on the history and arts of East Asia. Bill was a Hong Kong resident. AIC advisor Audrey Gould found him for us.
Bill took us through Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, and in another year to Myanmar and Viet Name and another around the edges of China.
Bill Hurst on the left
Dr. Jay Xu was with us in China, and Jay knew all the museum curators in that great country. Dr. Steve Little was with us in Cambodia, where he has spent some young years. I found Burma to be the most fascinating and unique of these areas. Two places were most memorable – the Churning of the Sea of Milk wall carvings at Angkor Watt and the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon.
The Shwedagon Pagoda:
At a market at Inle Lake Myanmar.
Bill Hurst was unique. He could speak a bit of many Asian languages. He understood the politics and history. He always found local markets and local forms of transportation. And most importantly (for many of us) he had exquisite taste, particularly for lunch and dinner – arranging local cuisine and staying in historic hotels. And paddling dugout canoes, swimming with water buffalos, climbing pyramid, examining jades in a museum vault, riding camels in the Gobi Desert,
delivering school supplies to youngsters in a small farm town in remote Yunan China.
Bill knew how to order, such as this luncheon in the Forbidden City Beijing
Bill and Jay showed us the back alleys
As well as the decorated temples.
So we look back fondly on Bill Hurst and the glory days of the Art Institute of Chicago.
