October 31, 2022
Linda Blaser
Rebecca Graff exhibit explores race, Chicago’s built environment
A new exhibit co-curated by Associate Professor of Anthropology Rebecca Graff will connect the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, aka the “White City,” to the material, spatial, and social histories of two 1892 structures located on Chicago’s privileged Near North and disinvested Near South Sides.
The City Beyond the White City: Race, Two Chicago Homes, and their Neighborhoods opens Thursday, November 3, 2022 through October 28, 2023. The physical exhibit is located at the Charnley-Persky House, 1365 N. Astor Street in Chicago—a historic home museum located in the city’s affluent Gold Coast. Graff and several Lake Forest College students conducted an archaeological dig at the home in 2015. The virtual exhibit will launch on November 3, 2022 and be accessed at beyondthewhitecity.org.
Graff co-curated the year-long exhibition with the late Pauline Saliga, former executive director of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) and the Charnley-Persky House Museum Foundation.
The City Beyond the White City features over 30 individual artifacts excavated from the Charnley-Persky House (Adler & Sullivan, 1891–1892) and from the former Mecca Flats (Edbrooke & Burnham, 1891–1892). Together, archival documents, oral histories, and 19th- and early-20th-century artifacts unearthed in archaeological digs are used to interpret a nuanced public history of race and place in Chicago for student and public audiences.
“The structures themselves—the Charnley-Persky House and the Mecca Flats—set the stories of those who lived there in motion,” Graff said. “But ultimately, this exhibition is an intervention between unpeopled architectural histories and narrativity about race and racism in Chicago that lacks a connection to the built environment and human experiences of place, not least the historic experiences of racism in Chicago. Archaeological insights plus architectural histories help to get us there.”
The exhibition is organized thematically into four sections. The first section, “Race and the World’s Fair Marketplace,” looks at the Fair as a literal marketplace for commodities and an ideological marketplace for schemes on race. Late 19th century racial ideologies are not always central to discussions of sites of architectural significance. But to understand people’s experiences of the built environment on three scales—the neighborhoods, the buildings, and the objects they left behind—the exhibit starts with the racial ideologies that suffused the 1893 Fair to see how they were made material at home.
The second section looks at consumption, health, and sanitation in turn-of-the-century Chicago. Contrary to what might be expected, the people who lived and worked in the Charnley House and in the Mecca Flats at the turn of the 20th century shared similar challenges to their health and sanitary infrastructure—ones that defied a simple socioeconomic pattern.
Ideologies of the domestic sphere and the women, domestic servants, and children who formed it were undergoing a rapid transformation. Racialized notions of American womanhood, in part impacted by the ratification of the 20th Amendment, played out differently at the three sites. “Women, Children, and the Domestic Sphere,” focuses on six notable women from the three sites: Nancy Green and Sophia Hayden; Helen Charnley and Marion Stephens; and Madame Nobia A. Franklin and Gwendolyn Brooks. Each of these women highlight the social history that converges around the sites. The section also looks at the children of Bronzeville and the Gold Coast, and the racialization of domestic laborers at the Mecca Flats and the Charnley House.
The final section, “Urban Renewal and Racial Ideology,” is perhaps the most significant because it forces the viewer to confront the lingering inequities built into American cities like Chicago. Mid-20th century federal and state urban renewal programs built upon the slum clearance legislation of the 19th century, destroying countless historic structures and vital neighborhoods largely without considering the interests and desires of the affected communities. Some of the most egregious examples of this in Chicago took place in Bronzeville, but the Gold Coast also experienced this destruction.
SAH will host an opening reception for the exhibition from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 3, at the Charnley-Persky House. Reservations are required as space is limited. Reserve tickets at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/exhibition-opening-the-city-beyond-the-white-city-tickets-446070848917.
Exhibition Hours: The exhibition is open Wednesdays and Saturdays from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. No reservations are required.
Group Tours: Group tours of the exhibition and Charnley-Persky House are available by appointment only. To schedule a group tour, please call 312-573-1365 or email Anne Bird at abird@sah.org.
The City Beyond the White City: Race, Two Chicago Homes, and their Neighborhoods has been made possible through the support of SAH, Lake Forest College, the Mellon Foundation, Illinois Institute of Technology, and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Sustaining Humanities through the American Rescue Plan in partnership with the American Historical Association.