Our monthly series of articles investigating the sites and activities of Chicago continues by picking up very near—across the street, in fact--Millennium Park, the focus of the installment in the January/February issue of the Newsletter. Millennium Park is situated in the northwest corner of the much larger Grant Park; directly across Monroe Street (Millennium Park's southern boundary) lies the Art Institute of Chicago, one of four closely clustered museums in Grant Park. The other three--the Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, and Adler Planetarium--are all situated nearby around a green that is known, appropriately enough, as the Museum Campus.

Art Institute of Chicago
Established in 1879, the Art Institute moved in 1893 to an opulent Beaux Arts building that was designed for that year's Columbian Exposition (i.e., the Chicago World's Fair). The building was designed as the exposition's World's Congress Auxiliary Building, but with the specific intent that the Art Institute occupy the building once the fair had closed. Today it is an internationally renowned art gallery, featuring one of the world’s major collections of American and impressionist paintings among its many important exhibits.

In Impressionism, the late 19th-century movement whose works are the Art Institute's calling card, the artist created works with the intent of capturing not the object in the work, but the perception in the eye of the beholder—dependent upon light, motion, and the emotion it evoked in the artist. Claude Monet, often regarded as the founding Impressionist, is represented in the collection by 34 paintings, including six from his groundbreaking Haystacks series and three from the Water Lilies series. Also in the museum is perhaps the most famous work of the period, Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The Art Institute's other famous and important Impressionist works include Renoir's Two Sisters (On the Terrace), Cezanne's The Bathers, Toulouse-Lautrec's At the Moulin Rouge, and Van Gogh's Self-Portrait, 1887.

The American collection is not so genre- or era-intensive; it features paintings, photographs, sculptures, furniture, and decorative art from the 17th century to the present day. The centerpiece of the photography collection is 153 pieces by Alfred Stieglitz, the groundbreaking American photographer, which were gifted to the museum by his widow, painter Georgia O'Keeffe. O'Keeffe herself is also heavily represented at the Art Institute, along with such other American masters of painting as Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Mary Cassatt. The collection also contains two of the most iconic paintings in the American canon: Grant Wood's American Gothic and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

The Art Institute has also recently completed the addition of a Modern Wing, which will house its 20th century collection (including such notables as Picasso's The Old Guitarist, a classic work from his "Blue period"). The new wing of the museum will be opened to the public on May 16--just days before the start of the ICA conference.

Museum Campus

Just a few blocks southwest of the Art Institute lies the Museum Campus, a 57-acre lakefront park that connects Chicago's three famous natural science museums: the Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, and Adler Planetarium. The area was once occupied by the northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive, a busy urban expressway; in 1998, however, the city moved the section westward. Since the three museums nearby were among the most frequented attractions in Chicago, the city decided to develop the land as a pedestrian green space that would allow visitors easy access from one museum to all the others. The park is something of a museum in itself, featuring monuments erected by the city’s immigrant communities to Czech revolutionary Karel Havlicek Borovsky, and to Polish heroes Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kosciuszko and Nicolaus Copernicus—the natural science museums, however, are the obvious focal point.

The Field Museum of Natural History, named for its earliest benefactor, Chicago merchant Marshall Field, was founded as a repository for the biological and anthropological collections assembled for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. It has since evolved into one of the most prestigious natural history museums in the world. The most famous item in its collection is "Sue": the largest (42 feet long, 12 feet high) and most complete (80 percent) Tyrannosaurus rex fossil ever recorded. Sue is an estimated 67 million years old, and despite its name (after its discoverer, Sue Hendrickson) the dinosaur’s gender is unknown. Other exhibits include an enormous range of other dinosaur fossils and taxidermied animals; a large collection of artifacts from ancient Egypt (complete with a walk-in tomb and 23 mummies) and hundreds of Native American civilizations.

Adjacent to the Field Museum, the John G. Shedd Aquarium was until 2005 the largest aquarium in the world. Holding 5,000,000 gallons (19,000,000 liters) of water, Shedd Aquarium also holds 2,100 species of marine life, including 25,000 fish. (One of them, an Australian lungfish named Granddad, arrived at the museum in 1933 and is still alive and kicking today!) Its Oceanarium remains the largest marine mammal facility in the world, which is home to dolphins, sea otters, and even Beluga whales. One of the most popular attractions is a recreation of a complete Caribbean coral reef in a 90,000-gallon tank; a similar Philippine reef opened in 2003, which includes a 400,000-gallon shark exhibit. Other exhibits at Shedd Aquarium include Amazon Rising--a 8,600-square-foot walk-in replica of the Amazon River and Jungle--and Waters of the World, which allows visitors to explore 90 aquatic habitats around the globe.

At the far end of the Museum Campus, on the peninsula known as Northerly Island, is the Adler Planetarium. It was the first planetarium in the western hemisphere, builit in 1930, and remains the only one in the world with two full-size theaters. The Sky Theater, which occupies the dome that caps the planetarium building, presents a gigantic projection of the night sky that is so precise that every movement in the sky is reflected in the projection. The Definiti Space Theater creates a digital virtual-reality environment powered by a cutting-edge digital simulator. But the theaters are only part of the Adler Planetarium’s 35,000 feet of exhibit space, which includes a scale model of the solar system, a 3-D tour of the Milky Way galaxy, ancient astronomical instruments, and, currently, a collection of 17th- and 18th-century European sundials that runs until August.

It's encouraging to see that science and culture are such a major attraction in Chicago, and gratifying to know that the city can respond to that demand with world-class institutions of research and scholarship. These museums are not to be missed when in Chicago for the 2009 ICA Conference.