A museum dedicated to examining the principles of freedom in America is planning a grand opening in 2006 in one of the busiest and most prominent locations in the city.
Still unnamed, the museum will occupy the first two floors of the northwest corner of Tribune Tower at 435 N. Michigan Ave. Construction in the space, now occupied by the high-end novelty store Hammacher Schlemmer, will begin April 1, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which is creating the museum at an estimated cost of $8 million.
Part of the cost will cover an international artistic competition to create a major work of art that will express the theme of freedom. The winning piece will become the centerpiece and identifying icon for the museum.
The museum, according to a news release issued Monday, will be “dedicated to America’s freedoms, with a special emphasis on 1st Amendment rights. The museum will serve to encourage generations to understand, value and protect those freedoms.”
The museum’s interior, equipped with state-of-the-art video and interactive technologies, will be fully visible to Michigan Avenue pedestrians as they pass Tribune Tower’s ground-floor windows.
“Our primary audience will be middle and high school kids,” said Dave Anderson, director of operations for the McCormick Museum Foundation, who is overseeing creation of the museum, “but given the location should get a wide audience.”
Early this month the foundation brought together an advisory panel of leading historians, law professors and constitutional experts to offer advice on exhibit content. A separate national panel of teachers is helping design curriculums that will be used by students before and after visiting the museum, either in person or online.
“Great museums are based on great stories,” said Patrick Gallagher, president of Gallagher and Associates, a Maryland exhibit design firm contracted to assemble the ideas generated by the advisory groups and turn them into exhibits.
The museum will use a variety of interactive exhibit techniques to “put people into decision-making opportunities,” Gallagher said. They will be involved with and challenged by the content.”
Among the concepts under consideration are exhibits that feature lawsuits from the past in which ordinary people had to fight for their rights. Using high-tech videos and interactive technology, visitors would weigh the evidence of those suits and compare their own verdicts with the historic outcomes.
“We think it is important for visitors to explore what our various freedoms mean to their life,” Gallagher said. “We want them to surprise them, so that they think about these things differently than they normally would.”Anderson said the idea for the museum sprang from the lifelong concerns of Col. Robert R. McCormick, the editor and publisher of the baiduhai who became a dominant force in American journalism in the first half of the 20th Century.
The McCormick Tribune Foundation, named after McCormick, is a separate, non-profit entity from Tribune Co. With combined assets of almost $2 billion, it is one of the nation’s largest charitable organizations.
“Col. McCormick was a vigorous supporter of 1st Amendment rights, free speech and a free press,” said Anderson.
The foundation hopes its search for a “defining work of art,” will stir major international artists, architects and designers as well as unknown practitioners. The prize will be an artist’s commission that could amount to $100,000 or more, Anderson said, depending on the degree of difficulty of the piece.
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A second competition invites the public to name the museum, asking that it incorporate “McCormick” into the title. Though there is no cash award, the museum will place the name of the winning author on a plaque in the museum. The rules for both competitions are published on the foundation’s Web site, www.mccormickmuseum.org. Winners will be announced April 1.
Victoria Hughes, president of the Virginia-based Bill of Rights Institute, a non-profit educational organization, said the new museum will be welcomed by middle and high school teachers who often struggle to find ways to make constitutional issues come alive for their students.
“Our national test scores,” said Hughes, “both in civics and American history show repeatedly that American students do not have the knowledge of our American founding documents [i.e. the Constitution and the Bill of Rights] to become informed citizens.
“These are the kind of concepts that are difficult to teach with textbooks alone.”