Museuming in Chicago

Last weekend I spent some 72 hours enjoying the St. Patrick's Day atmosphere and museums in Chicago. Since I was staying with a friend we agreed on two museums we both really wanted to visit together: the Art Institute of Chicago and The Field Museum.

We went to the Art Institute first, which is right next to Millennium Park and easily accessible by public transportation. I found it an excellent institution with some really amazing art. I greatly enjoyed exploring their European Art galleries and was pleased to come across many familiar artists and artworks. I am grateful to any institution that provides me personal experiences with unique and beautiful works of art, and at the Art Institute this happened in practically every room. I was also tickled to see the Art Institute kicking it old school, as it were, with the presence of hygrothermographs in some of the galleries. Aside from my favored European Art, I spent a lot of time in the Indian, Southeast Asian, and Himalayan Art gallery enjoying beautiful artworks which the Pulitzer Foundation's Reflections of the Buddha exhibition has definitely given me more appreciation for. The only disappointment was that the Ancient Art galleries were closed for renovation. Even so, the gallery mockups they had accompanying their apologetic signs looked wonderful. Being a glass-is-half-full kind of girl, I say this just provides me with an excellent excuse to return to Chicago in the very near future.

After a quick lunch my friend and I headed on over to The Field Museum. I had not been to the museum since 2006 when I visited Chicago for the sole purpose of seeing the traveling King Tut exhibition. I remembered being impressed with the museum then and it's still impressive. I just love their natural history galleries displaying dioramas of African, Asian, and North American animals. I always get a bit of a goose-bumped thrill when I behold those maneaters from Tsavo. I rank their presence in the museum up with the ever-impressive Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

In addition to visiting the regular museum galleries at The Field, we also purchased tickets to see the Opening the Vaults: Mummies exhibition. I have to say that, overall, I do not give the exhibition a high rating. They are presenting some very remarkable samples of mummified human remains alongside spectacular graphics of x-rays and MRI's, giving visitors a whole new way of looking at what makes a mummy. But I found the information presented in the text some of your very basic, run-of-the-mill mummy stuff with a bit of new information. I even missed some of the text because initially I did not see it since it's displayed along the top edges of the cases. I had to look up to read it, and I do not see how putting the text so high is in any way accessible to children or visitors with disabilities. They did have some excellent back-lit panels along the walls, though, which were very easy to spot and at the proper height. I was also a little dumbfounded to see many of the artifacts, in perhaps about half of the cases, not displayed with mounts but in storage boxes. Archival, blue storage boxes everywhere! It gave the whole exhibition a real slapdash feel for me. Museum staff might have thought the average museum visitor would not notice, being unfamiliar with storage materials, but I do recall a young boy asking his father why there were so many cardboard boxes. To wrap up, I found the mummies and artifacts very impressive but the displays themselves very mediocre, with the exception of the computer graphics and interactives which are very cutting-edge.

I greatly enjoyed my trip to Chicago and I am looking forward to a year of other such trips and museum adventures.