One can visit each of Chicago’s museums, peer into every exhibition case, study each piece of artwork and tap the keys of every interactive gizmo. And yet, museumgoers — the 10 million or so who visited Chicago’s more than four dozen museums last year — still won’t see many of the most fascinating items these institutions have in their collections.
The reasons are varied: Some items are so old and so fragile that any exposure to light or air can damage them. Some items deteriorate if left on exhibition for extended periods. And some are just too large. Others items are rotated through the display cases in shifts because the volume of the collection makes it all but impossible to display everything at once.
“We exhibit only 2 percent of what we’ve got,” says John Terrell, curator of oceanic archeology and ethnology at the Field Museum, where many items (such as the thousands of bugs stored in bottles) were intended for research purposes rather than for exhibition. Other museum curators quote similar numbers.
Curators at several of Chicago’s museums needed little prompting to name five items they would display if they had unlimited space:
ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
STEPHEN LITTLE, PRITZKER CURATOR OF ASIAN ART
1. More than 300 Japanese paintings collected since the 1920s (one is pictured above). “The major problem is that many of them are not in good enough condition to be displayed.” Some date from the 14th and 15th Centuries and are painted on paper or silk. Cracks in the paper and silk have developed because of age and because they have been rolled up like scrolls and have dried out.
2. A Chinese sculpture of a Bodhisattva, an enlightened being in the Buddhist religion. The almost life-size wood piece dates to the 12th or 13th Century. “It has some missing fingers. . . It was in a temple covered with smoke and dust and dirt. It will be stunning. It is now being worked on.”
3. A bronze drum used for summoning rain, from either Vietnam or Thailand, and dating to the 4th Century. “It’s in beautiful condition, but we can’t show it because we don’t have space.”
4. A collection of Islamic art — paintings, ceramics and metalworks — from the Middle East, mostly from before World War II. There is no gallery to display it.
5. More than 14,000 Japanese woodblock prints dating to the 18th and 19th Centuries. One gallery is devoted to them, and every 10 weeks, like clockwork, 30 different prints are shown. It will take years to show all 14,000. “My dream — because we will never get the (space) needed — is to create an electronic database through which people can access the collection.”
CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY
RUSSELL LEWIS, ANDREW W. MELLON DIRCTOR FOR COLLECTIONS AND RESEARCH
1. Charles Bird King’s 1837 portrait of Native American Ne-Sa-Au-Quoit (The Bear in the Fork of the Tree), a Sauk tribe leader. Considered one of King’s finest works, there is no space to display it.
2. A page from Abraham Lincoln’s arithmetic book. The page, with problems related to calculating discounts, dates to 1826 and is too fragile to display.
3. Knife and scissor sharpener cart from Chicago’s West Side, used by Joseph Antonucci between 1900 and 1961. The red and green cart, with huge spoke wheels, is too big and fragile to display.
4. The white leather Booth One (above) from the Pump Room, the legendary eatery in the Ambassador East Hotel, hasn’t been exhibited due to space constraints, but could go on the display in the future.
5. Several Bulls uniforms, including Michael Jordan’s 1989 uniform (top) can only be displayed for about six months at a time, because, like many costume artifacts, gravity and light play havoc with the fabric.
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
ELIZABETH SMITH, THE JAMES W. ALSDORF CHIEF CURATOR
1. “The Other Vietnam Memorial,” by Chris Burden. A large sculpture, about 25 feet in diameter, made from steel, aluminum and copper plates. “It’s almost like a gigantic Rolodex turned on its side, with name after name of Vietnamese people who died in Vietnam.” Though it has been displayed, the large space required prohibits it from being permanently installed in the museum.
2. “Chicago Mud Drawing,” by Richard Long (above). The 1996 piece, a circular form with handprints in mud, “was created on the wall and is inseparable from the wall, so we have had to build a wall in front of it to continue exhibiting other things.”
3. “Le Baiser,” by Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, is a sizable video sculpture installation that occupied about 1/3 of the space in the downstairs gallery when it was created in 1999. “It shows an image of the artist lovingly washing the windows of the Mies van der Rohe-designed Farnsworth House, contained within a half-scale model of the house.”
4. “Counter Circle No. 19,” by Tatsuo Miyajima, is an electronic piece about time and technology that requires darkness.
5. “The Gangster Sister from Chicago,” by Vito Acconci, is basically an audiotape that visitors hear when entering the gallery. Space hasn’t been available for several years to exhibit the piece.
FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
JOHN TERRELL, CURATOR OF OCENAIC ARCHEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY
1. A sizable collection of Pacific and Native American canoes (right). “We have more canoes than we could ever find space to display.”
2. An entire gamelan instrumental ensemble from Indonesia, which was on display for a decade, but was getting worn out.
3. Slit gongs (basically drums) from all over the world, specifically the Pacific and New Guinea. Their size prevents more than a few from being displayed.
4. Feathered body adornments, such as armbands, anklebands, Maori cloaks and Hawaiian capes. “We can’t exhibit them easily because of conservation reasons. The feathers are very sensitive to light and ultraviolet deterioration.”
5. Tapa, a cloth from Polynesia that is made from the inner bark of trees that has been beaten into a cloth, is “notoriously fragile and deteriorates from light and heat.”
ATTENDANCE AT CHICAGO MUSEUMS
Attendance at Chicago’s museums is booming, with the combined attendance at the city’s big four — the Shedd Aquarium, Museum of Science and Industry, Field Museum and Art Institute of Chicago — topping those for the White Sox, Blackhawks, Bulls and Bears games.
1999 1994
Attendance Attendance
Navy Pier
7,750,000 NA
Chicago Cubs
2,813,854 1,845,208
John G. Shedd Aquarium
1,851,618 1,789,222
Museum of Science & Industry
1,656,611 1,985,609
Field Museum of Natural History
1,501,465 1,227,062
Art Institute of Chicago
1,358,412 1,295,321
Chicago White Sox
1,338,851 1,697,398
Chicago Blackhawks
710,503 781,478
Chicago Bulls
560,012 853,196
Chicago Bears
452,635 468,015
Adler Planetarium
460,815 458,156
Chicago Historical Society
148,284 158,122
DuSable Museum
147,336 116,611
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Source: The Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau; Tribune archives %%
