For reasons of curiosity, nostalgia and guilt, and because Sept. 16-23 had been declared Museum Week by the City of Chicago, I promised myself early this month that sometime soon I would revisit at least one of the city’s great museums. I kept my promise, and I was rewarded in ways that I could not have imagined a few weeks ago.
I picked the Field Museum, because I really had not set foot in it in years and because it has a special resonance in my life. Part of my childhood was shaped by trips to the Field Museum. My grade schoolmates and I would be packed onto buses in Oak Park, then taken for a ride into the city for our tour of the museum, which included a pause for a noisy lunch and a quick detour to see the stuffed monkeys in the wildlife dioramas.
Old and new
Much has changed at the Field since then. Adult tickets are now $8 (with adjustments for students, groups and seniors), and Sue the dinosaur, prominently ensconced, is now the museum’s main attraction. But Stanley Field Hall, that great, spacious central concourse, is still there, a bust of its namesake perched atop a stairway at the south end, with an identifying label that reads: “Stanley Field, 1875-1964, President and Chairman of the Board, 1909-1964, Builder of a Great Museum.”
To my delight, though the hall has been redesigned considerably since I first saw it, those two magnificent tusked elephants that have been greeting visitors since 1921 remain a part of the scene. And I made certain that I would find my way to two other old pals from long ago, Bushman and Su Lin.
Sure enough, in a small case at the end of the “World of Birds” corridor, there is Su Lin, the giant panda, brought to the Brookfield Zoo in 1937 and, for a brief time until his death in 1938, the sweetheart of the animal kingdom in the Chicago area. A short archival film plays near the stuffed animal, reminding me of the many times my parents had taken me to the zoo, always to find Su Lin either dozing or just barely moving about.
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In the museum’s lower level, near the foot of the stairs, stands Bushman. He came to the Lincoln Park Zoo in 1930 as an infant gorilla and grew into a 555-pound adult. At the time of his death on New Year’s Day of 1951, he was one of the most famous creatures to live in Chicago.
Sue, of course, is the star of the Field these days. Except for her 600-pound skull, which is too heavy for the rest of her bones to hold, she stands at the north end of Stanley Field Hall, a lightweight duplicate of her head in its place and a small crowd always around her base. She’s smaller (42 feet long) than I had thought she would be, but there’s no question that she’s a big factor in the museum’s daily life. That huge, heavy skull has its own display case on the upper level, and near it is the Sue Store, where pins, pencils, posters, dolls, books and anything that can have “Sue” printed on it are sold.
Special touring exhibits
Along with Sue, the stuffed animals, the nature scenes, the re-creation of an Egyptian tomb, nature walks and the immense permanent array of bones, gems and artifacts, the Field is now host to big special touring exhibits. The display of costumes, masks and scenery designed by director Julie Taymor for the movies and for such stage spectacles as “The Lion King” runs through Nov. 4. Another special added attraction (with a special added admission cost), “Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth,” an exhibit “only (to be seen) in Rome, London and Chicago” (as a sign points out), is getting ready for its scheduled Oct. 20 opening. And, coming in 2002 is another guaranteed crowd-drawer, an exhibition devoted to chocolate.
These popular shows, and the extensive use of films, television and interactive displays, plus a restaurant outpost of the Corner Bakery chain off the main hall, are additions to museum life that have been introduced to the Field in recent years. The age-old sense of discovery that a good museum maintains remains in place, however, accompanied by guides, guards and clerks who were uniformly friendly and helpful when I asked my way around the museum.
Continuity of mission
I found a few quibbles. The marvelous busts and statues of African, American and Asian natives that Malvina Hoffman sculpted in the 1930s, which were a highlight of my school-day visits and which now ring the upper level of the museum, have display labels that are often placed near floor level, making them hard to read.
But the museum is still a house of wonders, and in the arrangement of its treasures of anthropology, geology, zoology and botany, there is a heartening sense of the continuity of its mission as a home for exploring the nature of our planet. It’s amazing, and reassuring, to learn the museum, founded in 1893 in the wake of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, has thousands of objects dating from its origin.
Continually, the museum is careful to point out the common traits, as well as the differences, of the people in all parts of the globe. This is done, vividly and entertainingly, in a display wall of footwear from around the world that invites viewers to “put yourself in someone else’s shoes.” And it is done in clear, simply stated terms in the explanations of exhibits on the lives of people in faraway places.
One section of the museum that I found particularly satisfying last week was a section devoted to “Community,” which showed how everything from street signs to T-shirts can give us a sense of identity and commonality.
It wasn’t a large exhibit, but it was thoughtfully assembled and displayed, and in a time when our community had been shaken to its roots, it was most moving.