Mugging on Milwaukee Avenue.

Chicago is great for finding unusual exhibits. Recently, I visited Intuit: the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art on Milwaukee Avenue. There I saw "Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots." The photos on display there are part of the personal collection of Mark Michaelson, who has amassed over 10,000 of these "portraits," dated from the 1870s through the 1960s.

I found Mr. Michaelson's hobby to be an interesting one. He doesn't seek out the mugshots of celebrities or notorious gangsters. Instead, he sees beauty and significance in the arrests of common folks. As I gazed at one silent face after another, I too felt an unspoken connection to these subjects.

These were real people, who may or may not have committed a crime. Some of them lived hard lives; they were poor, underprivileged or just in plain bad shape. Some of them seemed troubled, hurt or embarrassed. Others seemed to be quite jovial, even proud. Perhaps they had been arrested many times and it had become old hat, or more likely, a night in jail guaranteed a warm place to sleep and possibly a meal. Most memorable for me was the portrait of a bonnet-clad African-American woman who was picked up in Cincinnati around the turn of the 20th century. Her physique disclosed that her life was filled with fieldwork, perhaps as a sharecropper. The long welt on her neck revealed that she had been abused, but what I responded to was the overwhelmingly peaceful expression on her face, a contrast I found to be most visceral.

Above all, I was truly impressed with the artistic attention evident in these photos. These weren't the harshly lit mug shots of my imagination. I saw photographs with warm shades of gray, intentional soft focus and delicate washes of light framing some rather poignant human expressions.

I highly recommend a visit. Something like this doesn't come around every day, and Intuit is free with a donation. It's a great way to show some support for art in Chicago. — Aggie, Senior Designer