The love of museums is the best kind of love, an old love kindled in childhood, still aglow decades later. For many of us who grew up in the Midwest, the place we first were smitten was Chicago.
When I was 8, my mother and I boarded a bus in Wisconsin and became tourists here. We checked into a hotel in the South Loop area, one close to many of the targets of our tourism, the museums. An ashtray with a giant-panda theme bought at the Field long has been lost to a garage sale, but memories of the marvelous model-railroad display at Science and Industry-the beginning of a lifelong fascination with miniaturized reality-have remained undimmed.
A child’s love of museums easily survives adulthood. Great stuff on display can reach out to embrace every age and taste. The range of collections is from the humble to the opulent, from the pioneer tools and diaries in county museums sprinkled across the American plains to the Rembrandts and Matisses in the Hermitage in Leningrad. It stretches from the silliness of the Smile Face Museum in Silver Spring, Md., to the grim chronicle of the slave trade in a museum on Goree Island off the coast of Senegal.
In addition to the traditional museums, there are outdoor museums such as Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and ecological museums such as the Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. Just when you think you’re museumed-out, go to a museum with a child, and the magic comes roaring back.
Places of awe and inspiration and enlightenment, these treasure houses surely are, themselves, treasures.
But those of us who love museums have noticed a recent change in the objects of our affection.
On a trip west two summers ago, a station-wagon full of my family visited the Buffalo Bill Historic Center in Cody, Wyo. The collections there include Plains Indians artifacts, Western art and firearms. The latter collection was fascinating especially because of the scratch paper and pencils available throughout the place. Anyone who wanted more information than was offered on the identification cards in the cases could copy down an ID number for any individual weapon. The visitor then would type that ID into any of a number of computers, which would then offer information choices. Did the visitor want to know the gun’s manufacturer, designer, place in history? Any of that was available with just a touch to the screen.
Amazing! Museums, even the “interactive” kind, put their objects on display on a look-at-it-or-move-on basis. The museum in Cody, however, was allowing its visitors to sneak, in effect, behind the scenes, to tap directly into something beyond the display. Visitors were using the cased objects as springboards to the museum’s storehouse of knowledge.
Driven by increased sensitivity to racial and ethnic minorities, a shift in emphasis away from objects used just as objects and a realization that competition for audiences has never been greater, the museum world recently has seen change blowing through its somewhat musty halls.
“Museums are changing in America,” says Ellsworth Brown, president and director of the Chicago Historical Society. “There is a rapidly ascending curve of awareness of and concern for audiences.”
In Chicago, visitors riding that curve will be rewarded by a variety of new experiences. To note just a few at a few institutions here: A 747 plane “flying” overhead in the rotunda of the Museum of Science and Industry, a major object owned by the Field Museum for 88 years that soon will be presented in a totally new way and “exhibits” at the Chicago Historical Society that don’t rely on objects at all.
Among the ways the Field Museum of Natural History will usher in its 1993-94 centennial year will be the exhibiting of an object it has owned since 1905. The object will be presented in a context that may well prove to be a model for the future of anthropological collections of museums everywhere.
But before looking forward, a glance back.
Paleolithic burial sites show that man’s propensity to collect things goes back at least 2 1/2 million years. In levels of the Babylonian city of Ur dating to the 6th Century B.C., labels have been found describing 21st Century B.C. inscriptions. The Babylonian kings apparently collected antiquities.
In the 3rd Century B.C., a museum was established at Alexandria, but this was more a university than what we today would call a museum. The great religious houses of Europe collected fine art and other treasures, but these were not used as museum collections as much as assets to fund Charlemagne’s wars in the 9th Century A.D. In 1533 Henry VIII appointed a king’s antiquary to list and describe the antiquities of England.
By the 17th Century, there were both private collections and collections affiliated with universities such as the University of Oxford-Ashmolean Museum, established in 1683. These collections were termed “cabinets of curiosities,” and as science and exploration reached out and captured specimens of geology and biology and the artifacts of anthropology, the natural history museum was born.
It was in this spirit of gathering strange things from exotic locations and cultures that the Field Museum bought Ruatepupuke II, a meeting house built in 1880 by the Maori, the native people of New Zealand. It stood on the east coast of New Zealand’s north island at the north end of Tokomaru Bay, a replacement for a house that had been dismantled many years earlier.
To the Maori, a meeting house is a place of communion with one’s ancestors, a place in which the native language is spoken, where the culture is kept alive. Beyond a house of worship, a Maori meeting house has a life in itself in that it represents a particular forebear-Ruatepupuke was a celebrated ancestor of a Maori subtribe. The ridge pole of the house represents his spine, the rafters his ribs, the door his mouth, the roof boards his outstretched arms, the interior his belly. Carvings inside represent other ancestors.
How such a spirit-charged building came to be sold is something of a mystery. A family squabble has been speculated. At any rate, after changing hands a few times, Ruatepupuke II was bought by the then Field Columbian Museum for $5,000.
For that, the museum got a house that was big (about 16 by 20 feet with a 14-foot ceiling), rare (the only such house in the New World and one of only three outside New Zealand) and exotic (a central object of the cultural, political and social life of a group of people living about as far from Chicago as possible).
The house wasn’t displayed for 19 years. Then it was assembled and used as a showcase for Maori artifacts. Since 1977, except for a special exhibit in 1986, the meeting house has been out of visitors’ sight, hidden behind a partition, living in limbo.
“When I came here in 1986,” says Michael Spock, the museum’s vice president for public programs, “we were a beloved institution but kinda stuck. We’ve worked on the way we display our collections and have gotten to be about as good at that as possible. Our Pacific Northwest hall, I think, shows the best possible job of displaying objects.”
Indeed, the dramatic lighting and positioning of the Field’s collection of Northwest totem poles elicits an awed hush in visitors, a reaction seen otherwise only in tourists inside the huge cathedrals of Europe.
“I love objects,” Spock continues. “Objects tell the story directly to you. They tell all the wonderful secrets that are locked up in there. The issue now is how to restore enough of their context, and everyone comes to that problem with a different agenda.”
But for generations, one group whose agenda wasn’t included in the debate on how to present native objects was the native people themselves.
That is changing at the Field Museum.
Te Maori, the three-month international exhibit in 1986 that ended its tour in Chicago and brought Ruatepupuke II out of hiding, began the experience of Field curators working with the Maori, who, numbering nearly 300,000, are very much alive and well.
Seventy-five Maori traveled to Chicago for the opening and closing ceremonies of the exhibit here, a tense occasion for the museum. As Arapata Hakiwa, a Maori and a curator at the National Museum at Wellington, New Zealand, later said, “To have our treasures imprisoned in big glass 19th Century-style showcases, with uninspiring and impersonal labels set against drab, colorless backgrounds, is not my idea of Maori culture!”
But that’s not what the visitors found. In a news story then, one of the Maori delegation was quoted as saying, “The house is happier here.” She meant that the museum was treating their house with the same respect that the Maori felt.
Field representatives visited New Zealand as well, and genuine friendship and trust developed between the people once thought “primitive” and the musuem that once thought of them that way.
“When you get to know native people as friends, you move away from the view that other cultures are exotic,” says John Terrell, a Field anthropologist and curator of Ruatepupuke II.
As a direct result of that changing view, the meeting house remains in Chicago in an era in which native peoples are increasingly demanding the return of their artifacts.
“If we are going to keep a lot of what we have that was part of the culture of others, it will be because of the way we treat those objects,” Terrell says.
Ruatepupuke II has been restored for an exhibition on March 9 as a collaborative effort between the museum and the Maori, a collaboration personified in curator Terrell and visiting curator Hakiwa. During the restoration, issues arose almost daily that required the two cultures to come to an understanding.
One of the museum restorers working on the house was a woman. That would not be allowed in traditional Maori culture, but the Maori yielded this time to American ways. The threshold of the house would have to be split to allow handicapped access. Again the Maori agreed to that adaptation.
A set of protocols was developed on how the house is to be used. “We don’t want it to come alive only when a Maori comes to visit,” Terrell says. “On the other hand, it wouldn’t be appropriate for Chicagoans to become Maori wanna-bes. What they can do is be respectful and responsible.”
Some 30 Maori will attend the opening ceremonies for the house. In accordance with Maori tradition, locals will sit on one side of the doorway and visitors on the other. Terrell was asked who-Maori or museum officials-would be designated as “locals.”
“The Maori, of course.” he says.
Where once a museum expedition might have penetrated the jungles of Borneo or climbed the treeless peaks of the Andes Mountains, a recent expedition of the Chicago Historical Society trekked instead through the Uptown area of Chicago’s North Side.
The trek’s objective was to get to know the Vietnamese community, the subject of an upcoming Passports program on April 24 and 25.
Previous such programs have explored the city’s Greek, Italian, African, Chinese and Mexican communities. The most recent of these, a look into the Mexican-American community, took place over the course of two days last November.
On a Friday night at the society, participants ate a dinner catered by Lalo’s restaurant on West 26th Street and were given a slide lecture by scholar and community historian Antonio Delgado and community leader Jorge Prieto. The next morning a bus and walking tour of the Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods took participants to the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Rudy Lozano Public Library, Benito Juarez High School and Casa Aztlan, a social service center. Lunch was at another West 26th Street restaurant, Chano Chano. Members paid $55 for the two-day program, non-members $60.
Once an organization run by and for the higher society of the city and suburbs, the CHS now reflects what Brown, who came to the museum in 1981, calls a “broader, multicultural perspective.” Passports plays a role in what Brown sees as one of his missions: “To make a difference in the city.” It explains an important Chicago community to the rest of Chicago and helps members of that community understand how it has been shaped. All this is done totally without objects on display.
“For a long period-the ’60s, ’70s, part of the ’80s-things were the issue,” Brown says. “The classic purpose of a museum was to collect, preserve and interpret. Now, `collect’ and `preserve’ definitely are in second place here.”
Although the society still offers plenty of stuff on display-plates melted in the city’s Great Fire of 1871, Lincoln’s death bed, a copy of the Declaration of Independence-much of the institution’s energies now go toward understanding and interpreting for the rest of us the groups of people and the relationships between them that gave us our still-evolving city.
A program called “Neighborhoods” has been funded by the Joyce Foundation. Four neighborhoods will be selected, and museum staff will set up meetings with residents and establish dialogues. The result will be histories that could be presented in any of a number of ways-exhibits, books, videos. The histories will be available to the general public but also will return to those neighborhoods.
In this and many upcoming projects, the society will act as what Amina Dickerson, director of educational and public programs, calls a “facilitator.”
It will take that role in the end-of-April staging of a play, “The Salad Bowl Dance,” the story of the World War II resettlement of Japanese-Americans that brought the founders of Chicago’s Japanese-American population here.
It was the aftermath of that war, says Bob Archibald, president of the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, that broke the tradition of historical societies as places where elite folks looked at objects once touched by earlier elite folks. Americans of both sexes and all races went off to the battlefields or toiled on the homefront, and after war’s end, “a populist America put pressure on museums to become more inclusive. History now is about identity in living people. It’s about what kind of community we are, who our heroes are. History is about the humanities, not just reading dead people’s mail.”
The Museum of Science and Industry has a plan. It’s called MSI 2000, a road map for the museum to follow into the next century. Over the coming several years, visitors will see the plan falling into place, and they’ll begin to sample some of the enthusiasm that now nearly explodes from James S. (Jack) Kahn, president and CEO of the museum.
“My granddaughter, whose name is Emily, came to the museum for a visit,” he says. “She was 5 1/2 at the time, and when she walked in and saw the chopper hanging from the ceiling, she grabbed her older brother’s arm. `Patrick,’ she said, `Look at that!’
“This is an `Oh, my god!’ kind of place,” Kahn says, “a place of awe, wonder, amazement.”
When Emily’s parents asked her what she wanted to do the next day and went through a long list of possible entertainments, her response, Kahn says, was, “`Let’s go back to Papa Jack’s museum.’ “
Kahn tells the story out of more than grandfatherly and professional pride. Emily’s wanting to come back for more is at the heart of MSI 2000.
“This is a fun place,” Kahn says, “but we’re not here just to be a fun place. I can give you rocket-ship shake and roll, but I don’t believe that that is the institution that this place is. On the other hand, if shaking and rolling you tells you something about centrifugal force and mass, fine. If, incidental to our educational opportunities you have a blast, so be it.”
In 1990 Stephen Weil, deputy director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, wrote an article in Museum News magazine titled “Rethinking the Museum.” The senior staff and Kahn, who was associate director of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before coming here in 1987, have rethought their museum. That’s what MSI 2000 is all about.
What they have come up with is a place that will entertain but moreover will inform, that will educate but moreover will amuse.
The museum carefully has watched and polled its 400,000 annual visitors and knows a lot about them. It knows, for instance, that Latinos are underrepresented and is designing programs to help correct that. It knows that instituting a door charge in 1991 hasn’t hurt attendance and that those admission funds-second only to store sales on the income side of the ledger-will help make MSI 2000 come true as well as pay for some deferred maintenance. It knows that most visitors come in groups-family groups or school groups primarily-and that those in a group gathered around an exhibit learn from one another. The museum intends, by videos or volunteers or labels, to facilitate this self-teaching.
Every inch of the museum will work toward maximizing a visitor’s experience there. Even the placement of exhibits will play a role. What MSI 2000 calls “major thematic zones”-communication, human body, energy and environment, manufacturing, transportation and space and defense-will each occupy blocks of space around the rotunda. These zones will rise through four floors of the museum, from the ground floor up to the second balcony.
The zones not only organize the stuff of the museum, they enlarge the scale of the place. Instead of walled-in exhibit areas of 3,000 to 4,000 square feet, the zones will be 40,000 to 50,000 square feet each and will open the building both vertically and horizontally. The further into a zone one goes, the more in-depth is the learning experience.
Where appropriate, zones will include mini-libraries, labs, areas for role playing. Also, boundaries between zones will not be arbitrary divisions as they have been but transitional areas. For example, agriculture, food-processing and nutrition rub up against the environment, manufacturing and human-body zones on the first balcony.
A communications exhibit, harbinger of the communications zone, will open in April. An exhibit on AIDS is scheduled for 1994. It, like many future exhibits, will be built in modules so that if the march of science renders part of the exhibit obsolete, that module can be pulled out and replaced.
“It’s not going to be just, `Gee whiz, look at that’ anymore,” Kahn says. “If the subject is steel, it’s, `Here’s how you take it out of the ground, here’s how you process it, here’s how you make regular steel, here’s how you make special stainless, here’s where we see the technology going.’ “
In some ways, the Museum of Science and Industry of the future may more closely resemble the museum past. The orderly layout of exhibits recalls the original plan drawn up in 1929 before the museum opened. Updating the science of the museum-“we have virtually nothing on lasers, supercomputers, microstructure materials,” Kahn laments-restores the original balance of the institution. That balance was thrown out of whack after the Depression, when the museum became heavily dependent on corporate sponsorship. Thus the door was opened to the often-expressed criticism of the museum-that it’s somewhat a trade show.
“I wasn’t here then,” Kahn bristles, “but it isn’t a trade show now. For the most part, chief executives have the attitude that they just want to honestly tell the story of the business they’re in, to explain how it has made life easier.”
The zone plan further defuses charges of trade-showism.
A part of each zone will be “issue centers” where questions about the implications of technology will be raised. For instance, in the communications zone, for which Ameritech will be a major contributor, privacy and literacy are two issues that may be featured.
So much for the theories behind the rethought museum. What about the really neat stuff?
“When I first came here,” Kahn says, “I said I’d love to see a 747 here. With the help of United Air Lines, we’re going to get one.”
The 747 is an example of what the plan calls “tomorrow’s icons.” Icons are the answers to the question, “Which experience within this exhibit will become part of a story shared with friends and family years after the visit to the museum?”
Another possible icon of the future would be an exhibit on the skyscraper. Visitors would lay brick and install wiring in a structure that always would be under construction. An elevator ride would reveal the skeleton and engineering systems of the kind of building for which Chicago is famous.
And then there are the old icons, the giant heart, the German submarine, Colleen Moore’s fairy castle, the model railroad, the things that previous generations have fallen in love with.
“Don’t worry,” Kahn says. “There’ll always be a coal mine.”
