When the newly named Chicago History Museum closed its doors last year to begin a $27.8 million, 10-month extreme makeover, one of the goals of the staff was to find a way to keep its exhibits fresh and interesting so visitors would come back. When the museum at Clark Street and North Avenue reopens Saturday, it will include three exhibit areas that will change their content and focus every few months. The Tribune recently spoke with curators about what will be in the three first exhibits and how the spaces will be used in the future.
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Museum dresses up its exhibits
Costumes and textiles:
Christian Dior
The Chicago History Museum’s costume collection–more than 50,000 pieces of clothing and accessories–is one of the best in the nation, but in the old museum it occupied a small niche of only about 450 square feet.
Now it has a 1,300-square-foot gallery of its own, and its first exhibit traces Chicago’s crucial role in popularizing the “New Look” fashions of Christian Dior when he ruled haute couture after World War II.
Dior introduced his first collection at a salon in 1947 in Paris, and Marshall Field’s fashion director Kathleen Katlin was in attendance. Katlin very much liked what she saw: a feminization of styles after the harsh years of the war.
“The `New Look’ he created featured sloping shoulders, accentuated full breasts and cinched waists, padded hips and either pencil-thin or enormously full skirts,” said assistant costume curator Timothy Long, who put the exhibit together.
Katlin placed a bigger order than anyone else at the salon, and a special relationship developed between Field’s and Dior, whose designer originals were sold at the store’s haute couture 28 Shop. That led to Dior creating the first licensing arrangements in the fashion industry, in which stores were allowed to sell mass-produced clothing based on his designer originals.
The exhibit features 23 elegantly displayed day, evening and cocktail dresses and ball gowns he had a direct hand in designing between 1947 and 1957, when he died, and five of his hats. They were owned and worn by some of Chicago’s most notable women, including prima ballerina Maria Tallchief.
The museum has 17 of his dresses from the 1947-1957 era owned by dance master Ruth Page. “At the time she was purchasing them, 17 Dior dresses were an enormous investment,” said Long, “because each cost as much as a new car.”
The Dior exhibit will remain up for about nine months, he said, but keeping the dresses displayed on mannequins too long would damage them. They eventually have to go back to lightless, climate-controlled storage. He said the next show in the space has not been decided upon.
“We want to look at our total collection,” he said. “Textiles also include quilts, samplers, rugs and political banners, so we also plan on featuring those sorts of things as well as clothing in our exhibits.”
Special exhibition:
Ed Paschke
The old museum layout had a dedicated temporary exhibit space that featured traveling shows, such as a popular George Washington exhibit, as well as museum-generated shows such as a recent one on the 1920s flapper era.
The Pritzker Special Exhibition Wing will continue the tradition with a museum-designed show on the late Chicago artist Ed Paschke, with works borrowed from about two dozen local collectors.
“We decided to devote this inaugural show to an artist, because we want to talk about the place fine art has in Chicago history and its role in the city’s cultural scene,” said Phyllis Rabineau, vice president of education and interpretation.
“Ed Paschke fits, because his work sometimes deals with historical subjects, such as a dual portrait of Leopold and Loeb [two Chicago teenage thrill killers from the 1920s] that we are displaying.”
A re-creation of Paschke’s Chicago studio features two works still in progress when he died in 2004.
“At the time of his death, he was working on two large paintings on the Lewis and Clark expedition for Lewis and Clark College in Oregon,” Rabineau said. “He was at the stage of having finished them in black and white and was about to apply the colors he wanted.”
A video by the Art Institute of Chicago shows the paintings as they likely would have appeared had Paschke had time to apply the vivid colors he is noted for.
“Seeing the two paintings at the stage he left them in is a unique opportunity to see his thought processes and working processes,” said Rabineau.
Community gallery:
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Southeast Side
“We will have rotating exhibits every few months featuring individual communities in the Chicago metropolitan area,” said curator Joy Bivins.
“Sometimes they will be ethnic communities; sometimes they will be geographic neighborhoods; sometimes it will be a suburb. We will use the space to explore life in those communities and celebrate them and what they mean to Chicago as a whole.”
The inaugural exhibit, she said, might surprise even some lifelong Chicagoans. It celebrates the oldest Mexican-American neighborhood in the city, on the Far Southeast Side.
“It takes in parts of four neighborhoods–South Chicago, South Deering, East Side and Hegewisch–which are so far south and east sometimes people think it’s Indiana,” she said.
Mexican immigrants first began moving there at the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, escaping their homeland either for political reasons or because of economic havoc. They found jobs in area steel mills, especially U.S. Steel’s now defunct South Works.
The Mexican community still is very much in evidence in the old steel mill district. The exhibit uses photographs and artifacts to focus in on the experiences of several generations of families who settled there and remain there.
“It also shows the decline of the steel industry, which enabled these families to build a solidly middle-class community,” said Bivins.
The exhibit on the Southeast Side will be up for several months, she said, before giving way to a new exhibit on northwest suburban Schaumburg.
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MORE COVERAGE: A walk-through of the new Chicago History Museum. AT PLAY
COMING SUNDAY: Architecture critic Blair Kamin reviews the revamped space.