MUSEUMS IN THE PARK
Summary
Museums in the Park is a consortium of ten of Chicago's most important cultural institutions, including Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Chicago Academy of Sciences, Chicago Historical Society, DuSable Museum of African American History, The Field Museum, Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of science and industry, and John G. Shedd Aquarium. The group uses pooled financial resources to promote a culture of museum-going in Chicago.
In early 2006, the Museums in the Park marketing committee asked Chicago-area advertising and design firms to submit concepts for a brochure that would excite and inform tourists and remind Chicagoans of the cultural gems waiting in their own front yard.
Slides
Museums in the Park is a consortium of ten of Chicago's most important cultural institutions, including Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Chicago Academy of Sciences, Chicago Historical Society, DuSable Museum of African American History, The Field Museum, Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of science and industry, and John G. Shedd Aquarium. The group uses pooled financial resources to promote a culture of museum-going in Chicago.
In early 2006, the Museums in the Park marketing committee asked Chicago-area advertising and design firms to submit concepts for a brochure that would excite and inform tourists and remind Chicagoans of the cultural gems waiting in their own front yard.
The idea
We wanted to show museums not as they are, but as they seem. More precisely, we wanted to show them as they seemed to us as children, when the world was not yet fully explained to us, and every trip to a museum was like a curtain being lifted. What would we see? What would we learn?
The headline
This sense of wonder often eludes us as adults. Does it have to? We think not, especially when there are so many amazing places, right here, pulsing with the possibility of new discoveries. The headline of the brochure—So Much Wonder So Close to Home—is a gentle admonition not to squander the opportunity to be amazed.
The artwork
Although we had access to thousands of photographs of the Museums in the Park, we chose to do original illustrations. Only in this way, we believed, could we demonstrate the magical alter-egos of the staid stone buildings in which wonder awaits.
Copy highlight:
Museum-going is out of step with our culture of instant, overwhelming gratification. Museums do not offer 0% financing until August, 2009. No one will score a touchdown. There are no rollercoasters. You probably cannot buy funnel cake.
Copy highlight:
One question I often have is, if the light tumbling down tumbles down from long dead stars, if the long cold journey through space is so protracted that light moves like water through a hose, squirting out even after the spigot is turned off, why don't we ever see them disappear?
Copy highlight:
There are fish on the bottom of the ocean for which science has not even created names. I could name one of those fish. If I found one that had a face like a bulldog and a body that shone with bioluminescence I would name it the Glowbrutus. Then, when the Shedd got themselves a Glowbrutus I would come every weekend and stand by the Glowbrutus tank and smile. "That's my fish," I would tell people. They'd probably think I was crazy and move away very slowly. But the Glowbrutus and I would know. I'd give it a little wink and it would swim away, gulping and snuffling through the coral, a sure sign of our everlasting, adamantine bond.
Copy highlight:
That paint was on the palette of Vincent Van Gogh, I say to myself. He mixed those colors himself. Perhaps he even put a finger into a dollop of ochre and swirled it, wiped his hand across his forehead in the hot Arles sun and swirled some more, looking for the perfect color. If so, his very DNA is in that paint. Van Gogh himself is literally on the canvas. I find this too beautiful for words.
Copy highlight:
Had he stayed in the United States, Elijah McCoy would have been a slave, instead of an inventor. I think about that sometimes. In order to help this country, Elijah McCoy had to escape it. There is a lesson there that is bigger than America and more important than machinery. I'm glad someone is teaching it.
Copy highlight:
From time to time, when I'm standing in a modern art museum, I'll hear someone tell their wife—it's always a man who says this—that they could have easily painted whatever it is they are looking at. "It's just a red box inside a black box, Martha. I could do that." I like to imagine that these people are a living installation in the museum. I squint my eyes and imagine a small white plaque next to them that read: "Killjoy, 2006."
