The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago's Grant Park, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 million people annually. Its collection, stewarded by 11 curatorial departments, is encyclopedic, and includes iconic works such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, and Grant Wood's American Gothic. Its permanent collection of nearly 300,000 works of art is augmented by more than 30 special exhibitions mounted yearly that illuminate aspects of the collection and present cutting-edge curatorial and scientific research.As a research institution, the Art Institute also has a conservation and conservation science department, five conservation laboratories, and one of the largest art history and architecture libraries in the country—the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries.The growth of the collection has warranted several additions to the museum's 1893 building, which was constructed for the World's Columbian Exposition. The most recent expansion, the Modern Wing designed by Renzo Piano, opened in 2009 and increased the museum's footprint to nearly one million square feet, making it the second-largest art museum in the United States, after the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Art Institute is associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a leading art school, making it one of the few remaining unified arts institutions in the United States.In 2017, the Art Institute received 1,619,316 visitors, and was the 35th most-visited art museum in the world. However, in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the museum was closed for 169 days, and attendance plunged by 78 percent from 2019, to 365,660.
Charles Robertson (1858–1935), a biology professor based in Carlinville, Illinois, conducted a decades-long study recording interactions between species of insects and flowering plants within a 10-mile radius of his home. His records have enduring value as legacy data and provide invaluable insights into an ecosystem that can never be observed firsthand again. However, consistent with the typical scientific practices of his time, Robertson’s publications leave gaps in the information required by scientists reusing his work today. One key source of context for his published findings is his archived correspondence, part of the Charles Robertson Papers at the University of Illinois Archives. His correspondence documents when, where, how, and with whom he exchanged thousands of insect specimens. This paper presents the results of a quantitative analysis of data extracted from Robertson’s correspondence, which provides some of the contextual and methodological information missing from his published works. This analysis demonstrates the essentially collaborative nature of Robertson’s research, the contributions of his collaborators, the challenges of species determination, and the value of considering specimen exchange in analyses of scientific correspondence. The connections documented in this correspondence made his landmark study possible by pooling expertise that was distributed across four decades and throughout the U.S. and Canada. The associated dataset makes that correspondence analyzable and indexes items, correspondents, and specimens to the digitized records, making the original materials more accessible and navigable.
Systemic challenges facing K-12 teacher preparation programs may represent opportunities for museums with strong educational missions. This article offers insights from a two-year partnership between a campus art museum and teacher education program in which future secondary-level teachers in all disciplines gained hands-on experience in lesson planning, using artwork on display at the museum as a common thread. This partnership took place in the context of a new methods sequence for a small teacher preparation program, in which all students took an interdisciplinary class covering shared issues in curriculum and instruction while completing a discipline-specific methods lab. The authors describe the sequence of museum visits and project development in-depth while highlighting the lived experiences of participating preservice teachers, and then turn to describe their own learning. The conclusion provides takeaways for museum educators interested in pursuing a similar strategy with teacher education programs.
This paper examines the restoration of two black-light sculptures, Study for the Gates #14 (Clytemnestra from "Iphigenia in Aulis" by Euripedes) (1967) and Study for the Gates #15 ("a flock of morning birds" from "Iphigenia in Aulis" by Euripedes) (1967), by the artist Chryssa, as a case study in conserving light-based artworks made with materials and techniques reduced to obsolescence. The restoration process demanded more than replicating components; it required rebuilding the infrastructures that made the works possible and negotiating between preservation and re-creation, permanence and ephemerality. The authors share their experience as a cautionary example, describing the urgent need for conservation strategies that address the accelerating disappearance of neon materials and technologies, as well as the skills producing them.
Abstract: This essay considers what Donna Haraway and others have called "multispecies relations." It takes artist Alison Ruttan's The Four Year War at Gombe (2009–2011), which comprises photographs of a reenactment of a chimpanzee war studied by Jane Goodall, as an invitation to contemplate how the biological and behavioral similarities between humans and chimpanzees have been figured. Exploring the promises and risks of multispecies imaginings and multispecies mourning, the essay cautions against the way "species," as a category of thought and a means of differentiation, is used in contemporary discourses in a manner that elides its troubling racist history. Indeed, the relation of chimpanzees to humans has been racialized historically, and "species" have been evoked to divide not only the order of primates but also the category of the human.
