Sightseeing in Plainfield

Johansen Farms started more than 85 years ago, when Hans Johansen and his family immigrated to Illinois from Copenhagen. Upon their arrival, the family started to grow and sell flowers and vegetables, slowly transforming their business from a roadside farm stand into a flourishing plant empire.

Today, sunlight filters into Johansen Farms’ 24 greenhouses, illuminating scarlet petals and verdant tendrils as they rise from beds of moist earth. Within these humid growing centers, gardeners cultivate more than 2,000 varieties of plants and flowers, from blooming annuals to hearty grasses. Guests meander at will, stopping to sniff baby flower buds and eye appetizing fruits and veggies.

Throughout the Halloween season, mad scientists overrun a section of SciTech Hands On Museum to construct a haunted laboratory. The 20- to 25-minute, ghoul-infested journey hijacks 200 of the museum's interactive exhibits and exploits the brainpower of the museum's Fermilab physicist founders to create an experience as terrifyingly educational as a pre-calc class taught by a wild boar. Adults and older children brave enough to step across the spooky threshold will encounter wispy tendrils of smoke and fluttering strobe lights winding up and down the museum's two floors. Bubbling beakers, freakish goblins, the George Foreman Grill, and other byproducts of experiments gone horribly awry loom in the museum's shadowy corridors. Once troops have braved the Haunted Museum, the main museum awaits, where guests can interact with noncursed exhibits or slip into the gift shop or café.

In 1961, 30 artists banded together to form the Naperville Art League in the hopes of nurturing community appreciation of arts and culture. The optimistic, determined bunch gathered in the basement of the First National Bank of Naperville and held art classes in their own homes, not annexing an official space until 1978. Today, a group of painters, photographers, and sculptors carries on the tradition of interartist camaraderie and education in better-equipped digs. A spacious gallery hosts art shows, as well as a monthly exhibit of members' work created around a theme, such as Fabulous Fakes or Changing Lanes. Artists also infect the community with a passion for the arts by teaching classes for adults and children. In addition to traditional styles such as oil painting and pen drawing, artists acquaint groups with esoteric art forms such as mosaics, needle felting, or collaging shredded bank statements.

Showcasing local and international artwork, Collector's Choice Art Gallery stocks a wealth of prints, original work, and sculpture in its combination gallery and frame design studio. Solace-seeking apartment decorators find eclectic accents in 700 stock fine art prints and posters, including Greg Stocks's landscapes, the watercolor stylings of Marilyn Simandle, or the arboreal imaginings of painters Chris Donovan and Marysia Burr, both known for their classical portraits of nude Ents. Collectors can adopt lonely paper or canvas mini prints smaller than 8"x10" ($9), small-size posters at 16"x20" ($20), and full-size printed prizes ($40–$60).

The Genuine Article is a studio, a workshop, a gallery, a bead shop and a hands on classroom. You may be thinking this is a lot in one location, but we have something no one else has, Betty James Hoppensteadt a professional artist for over 30 years.

Armed with frames spanning the gamut from classical to trendy, Boulevard Fine Art’s picture wranglers enhance and protect artwork through custom framing services. Customers can encase celebrities under glass without the need for strategically poked air holes by framing favorite posters ($40–$60 for 20"x24") or place childhood finger paintings in standard 8"x10" frames ($15+) that preserve prodigious pre-K artifacts. Original paintings find new homes with canvas services, including stretching, framing, and labor ($65–$85 for 24"x30"), upping the artwork ante with unique, hand-finished frames from Italy, Germany, and Peru. With more than 40 years of combined framing experience, the staff helps customers make aesthetically minded decisions or tell when paintings are about to molt.