Chicago History | Spring/Summer 2023

CHICAGOHISTORY

SPRING/SUMMER 2023

CHICAGO HISTORY THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM • VOLUME XLVII, NUMBER 1

SPRING/SUMMER 2023 CONTENTS

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From the Editors

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Critical Museum Observation in Action: Planning for University of Illinois Chicago Undergrads to Comment on Chicago: Crossroads of America A conversation between Drs. Elena Gonzales and Emmanuel Ortega

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Diversifying Narratives at the Chicago History Museum Celia Doherty, Jasmine Harrison, Antonio Irizarry, Daniela Jimenez, Meg Magennis, Dormiann Marie Otoko, and Kathleen Rogozinski

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Using Objects to Share Latino Experiences in Chicago M. Ashley Boley, Jailine Gomez-Mendoza, Juan Najera, and Ravi Patel

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Undoing the Silencing of Historical Narratives Melissa Campos, Alexa Fulgencio, Lucy Harmon, Kira Oberman, Josephina Opsenica, and Brynne Tolentino

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Addressing Authenticity in the Chicago History Museum Siobhan Broucek, Jessica Cherco, Tony Zapata Fernandez, Collin Logsdon, and Ximena Ramirez

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Going Beyond the Objects Aghadadash Balagadashov, Shenfan Feng, Adriana Gasgonia, Auden Granger, Jendayi Ingram, Romy Macasaet IV, Merlin Ryan, and Mingzheng Zhang

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The William Blair Effect: Making History Interviews with Michelle Collins and John Ettelson Timothy J. Gilfoyle

CHICAGO HISTORY Vice President of Marketing and Communications Thema McDonald Editors Heidi A. Samuelson Esther D. Wang Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography Timothy Paton Jr.

Copyright © 2023 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, IL 60614-6038 312.642.4600 chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

Cover: Courtesy of and photograph

by Anton Miglietta, Teacher, Instituto Justice Leadership Academy - Rudy Lozano Campus.

CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY OFFICERS

Mary Louise Gorno Chair Daniel S. Jaffee Chair Emeritus Warren Chapman First Vice Chair Mark Trembacki Second Vice Chair Monica Weed Treasurer Mark Trembacki Treasurer Emeritus Randye Kogan Secretary Donald E. Lassere Edgar D. and Deborah R. Jannotta President HONORARY T R U S T E E

The Honorable Lori Lightfoot Mayor, City of Chicago

TRUSTEES

James L. Alexander Paul Carlisle Walter C. Carlson Warren K. Chapman James P. Duff Gary Feinerman Lafayette J. Ford T. Bondurant French Guillermo Garcia Alejandra Garza Timothy J. Gilfoyle Gregory L. Goldner Mary Louise Gorno Brad J. Henderson David D. Hiller Tobin E. Hopkins Janice Jackson Daniel S. Jaffee Jennifer “Jill” Kirk Randye A. Kogan Donald Lassere Robert C. Lee John Low Ralph G. Moore Maggie M. Morgan Mark Potter Arnaldo Rivera Joseph Seliga Lei Shen Jonathan Skinner Samuel J. Tinaglia Mark D. Trembacki Ali Velshi

Gail D. Ward Monica M. Weed Robert R. Yohanan HONORARY LIFE TRUSTEE

The Honorable Richard M. Daley The Honorable Rahm Emanuel LIFE TRUSTEES

David P. Bolger Laurence O. Booth Stanley J. Calderon John W. Croghan Patrick F. Daly Patrick W. Dolan Paul H. Dykstra Michael H. Ebner Sallie L. Gaines David Gupta Barbara A. Hamel M. Hill Hammock Susan S. Higinbotham Dennis H. Holtschneider C.M. Henry W. Howell Edgar D. Jannotta Falona Joy Barbara L. Kipper Judith H. Konen W. Paul Krauss Josephine Louis R. Eden Martin Timothy P. Moen Potter Palmer Jesse H. Ruiz Gordon I. Segal

Larry Selander Paul L. Snyder TRUSTEES EMERITUS

Catherine L. Arias Bradford L. Ballast Gregory J. Besio Michelle W. Bibergal Matthew Blakely Paul J. Carbone Jonathan F. Fanton Cynthia Greenleaf Courtney W. Hopkins Cheryl L. Hyman Nena Ivon Gary T. Johnson Douglas M. Levy Erica C. Meyer Michael A. Nemeroff Ebrahim S. Patel M. Bridget Reidy James R. Reynolds Elizabeth D. Richter Nancy K. Robinson April T. Schink Jeff Semenchuk Kristin Noelle Smith Margaret Snorf Sarah D. Sprowl Noren W. Ungaretti Lawrie B. Weed Joan Werhane *As of February 2023

The Chicago History Museum acknowledges support from the Chicago Park District and the Illinois Arts Council Agency on behalf of the people of Chicago.

F RO M T H E E DI TORS I

e’re doing something a little different with this issue of Chicago History. In 2021, the Chicago History Museum was named a recipient of the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation’s new “Broadening Narratives” grant, a groundbreaking collections initiative designed to illuminate the stories of underrepresented communities. The Museum is one of only eight organizations in Chicago to receive this grant, which will help fund our initial work to support authentic inclusion of traditionally marginalized groups in our signature exhibition, Chicago: Crossroads of America.

In 2006, the Chicago Historical Society reinvented itself as the Chicago History Museum, the new name reflecting a commitment to inclusively serving the people of Chicago. The cornerstone of this transformation was Chicago: Crossroads of America, a 14,000 square foot exhibition featuring more than 1,200 artifacts and documents, which focuses on a selection of stories that illustrate Chicago’s crossroads nature and its national and global influence. Today, the exhibition still stands, largely as it was conceived more than 20 years ago.

As we examine Crossroads today through an evolving lens of antiracism and decolonization, we know that, at best, it falls short of authentically reflecting the experiences and contributions of communities that have faced oppression along lines of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity. At worst, its limited portrayals and omissions further harm certain visitors seeking their place in the city’s story. Addressing these shortcomings is made more urgent by the public trust and authority we are given as the Museum that shares the history of all of Chicago. We are especially aware of our responsibility to the more than 50,000 young people who visit on school trips each year. Whether or not they see themselves reflected in the city’s narrative can have a formative impact on their civic growth and empowerment well into the future.

The “Broadening Narratives” project thus seeks to understand the needs, perceptions, and possible points of connection with nonvisitors of CHM, as well as understand the experiences of those engaging in the signature exhibition. In connection to this work, a fall 2022 Introduction to Museum and Exhibition Studies class at the University of Illinois Chicago, under the direction of Dr. Emmanuel Ortega, visited the Museum to evaluate Crossroads and the Museum more broadly with a particular focus on the Latino stories—and the lack thereof—shared in the Museum’s current exhibitions. Their insights are important for us moving forward in the examination of Crossroads as well as in the development of our Aquí en Chicago exhibition, scheduled to open in 2025, which centralizes the historically persistent cultural presence of Latino/a/x communities in Chicago.

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The students were posed the following five questions and asked to focus on one during their visit: 1.

Based on your visit to the Museum, what are the most pressing themes that can help the diversification of narratives in the Chicago History Museum?

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Based on your visit to the Museum, and considering the objects displayed, what other objects do you think would help nuance the Latino experience in Chicago?

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Based on your visit to the Museum, how do you think we can accomplish diversifying voices in the narrative about the history of Chicago and bring nuance to the histories of different peoples in the city without stereotyping groups or ignoring intersectionality?

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Often, issues of authenticity emerge when you visit the Museum. Based on your visit, how can the new Aquí en Chicago exhibition approach the issue of authenticity? What can be avoided and how?

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What are the ways in which the Museum could engage with the needs, values, and histories of a broader collective of visitors beyond adjusting the objects on display?

They used the observations from their visit, supported with research, to write essay responses that were then compiled into the articles you’ll find in this issue. As you read their essays, we invite you to think about your own answers to these questions.

Critical Museum Observation in Action:

Planning for UIC Undergrads to Comment on Chicago: Crossroads of America A conversation between Drs. Elena Gonzales and Emmanuel Ortega January 2023

The entrance to the Museum’s largest permanent exhibition, Chicago: Crossroads of America, which opened in 2006 when the Chicago History Museum had its grand re-opening.

n Fall 2022, the students of Emmanuel Ortega’s Introduction to Museum and Exhibition Studies course at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) collaborated with Elena Gonzales, curator of civic engagement & social justice at the Chicago History Museum (CHM), to critique and constructively comment on the Museum’s central exhibition Chicago: Crossroads of America, which is in a planning grant from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation that will ultimately result in an update to this seventeen-year-old exhibition over the course of the next several years. Dr. Ortega’s students have taken over Chicago History magazine in this special issue to share their assessments and ideas about Crossroads and other exhibitions within CHM, as well as

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the forthcoming exhibition Aquí en Chicago, in an ongoing conversation about how we can collaborate to support CHM’s new vision to be one of the most trusted and inclusive cultural institutions of our collective history.

Dr. Gonzales spoke to the class in October 2022 and oriented the students to her work as a curator and the work CHM is doing on its central exhibition. The students then visited CHM independently, completed the Critical Museum Observer’s Guide, newly updated by CHM’s Education Department, and wrote on one of several questions relating to their visit. This brief introductory conversation between Drs. Gonzales and Ortega will situate the work of the students in the context of ongoing scholarship and practice at both CHM and UIC.

Elena Gonzales: Could you tell me a bit about what your students are doing with this assignment? What is your class all about, and how did you come to want me to work with you and the class?

Emmanuel Ortega: I am an assistant professor in the department of Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). I am also the Marilynn Thoma Scholar in Art of the Spanish Americas.

I preface my answer with this title because my approach to this specific class, that is, Introduction to Museum and Exhibition Studies, was a bit unorthodox for this semester.

We are in the process of revamping our minor in Museum and Exhibition Studies, and I was assigned to teach this class to understand a bit more what our students needed and were most eager to learn. This class was highly diverse with students from many groups being represented. However, I would say that roughly 35% were of Latino background. In total we had 35 students enrolled. From the start, I presented the class with a series of ethical conundrums that problematized the study of museums and exhibition spaces. We looked at the perils of authenticity and empathy, the politics of monuments, and the history of institutions that continue to disseminate colonial ideals of race, class, gender, and national identification. I was happily surprised to see how well students understood this information. This was the first time I was back in person after almost two years of pandemic Zoom courses. The lively interactions in person made for an incredible semester and critical space. I was eager to hear their opinions regarding the ways local museums aim to represent the local, the national, and the universal through their halls and galleries. It is with this premise in mind that I reached out to you to see how my students could interact with the Chicago History Museum. Your work inspired us all to come up with a series of questions we could answer, especially regarding the critical ideas we studied throughout the semester.

I love the ways in which social activism turned your position into a permanent one. Can you tell me a bit more about how this process changed your approach to the museum space and how this exercise with my students aims to continue the larger mission of social justice?

EG: It’s true—I began work at CHM back in summer of 2021 as a contractor, curating Aquí en Chicago, an exhibition that centers the protest of CHM by students from Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy (Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy).1 It shows how the work of the students stands on generations of Latinos in the city going back more than a century. The persistent presence of these communities is the students’ legacy, as is the work of these communities. This ranges from the deceptively simple practices of raising culturally aware families, building businesses, and making public expressions of culture, such as murals, to more overt resistance to white supremacy and colonialism through protests, walk outs, strikes, and the like. I’m still working on this project—the exhibition opens in fall 2025—but in October 2022 I joined CHM full time in this curatorial position, which is a new one for the

This low-rider sparked the Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy (Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy) students’ protest in 2019.

Here are the students on their visit before the removal of the vehicle.

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First page of the Critical Museum Observers Guide produced by the CHM Education Department to encourage youth to build their observation skills specifically regarding ways museums curate for culture.

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Fourth page of the Critical Museum Observers Guide produced by the CHM Education Department with input from Elena Gonzales to encourage youth to share their thoughts on what they want to see exhibited in the future.

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Published in 2019, Elena Gonzales’s Exhibitions for Social Justice (Routledge) assesses the state of curatorial work for social justice in the Americas and Europe today.

Museum. I’m very excited about the way Charles E. Bethea,2 the Museum’s director of curatorial affairs, is building the curatorial department so that we can best support the Museum’s new vision. The creation of this position was part of that work, as was the creation of another new position at CHM. Rebekah Coffman3 joined CHM as the curator of religion and community history in spring 2022, and our positions work in tandem in many ways.

The process of moving from contractor to full-time employee was very organic for me because of how welcoming and inclusive my colleagues were of me from the beginning. We began work on my project through a very open conversation about the overarching changes that would be taking place at the Museum and how my project would fit into that process. However, there have been certain important changes that have come through the process. Two important ones come to mind. First of all, my new position has made the Museum’s investment in change, inclusive history, and a holistic history of Chicago clear. My collaborators on Aquí can see that my work on this project is not set up to be an isolated effort but rather part of a larger long-term institutional plan.

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Secondly, my new position allows me to fully engage my expertise in our work at CHM. I believe that one of the reasons CHM sought me out for the contractor position initially was my book, Exhibitions for Social Justice.4 I use it to explore ways of using the space inside the gallery to work for social justice, as well as ways to shift our institutions to better work for social justice overall. My new position at CHM mirrors this. I am working on an exhibition where we are contending with a long history of marginalization of Latino/a/x people in Chicago generally and CHM specifically. And I am helping to institutionalize practices at CHM that will find and dismantle our own unintended biases, making us a better partner, neighbor, and steward of all Chicago history. This is a collaborative effort among the staff, directors, president, and board, and I’m just one member of the team. Long story long, I’m afraid, the process of shifting to the new position gave me a greater sense of agency to make change at CHM toward practices of inclusivity and made my agency visible to all kinds of stakeholders, thus making it more possible to do my work.

As for your students, I was very excited when you first brought up the prospect of my working with them back in summer of 2022. Your course seemed like the perfect laboratory for the ideas that I’m exploring through my job and that CHM is grappling with as an institution: authenticity and authority, decolonization, antiracism, and allyship. I mentioned the planning project— “Broadening Narratives”—that the Museum is undertaking through the current Donnelley grant. Bringing a diversity of stakeholder voices to bear on Crossroads is a key part of this planning work that will help CHM remake its central exhibition over time. Your students are an ideal group to include in many ways: the Museum is actively Part of the Broadening Narratives planning project is to receive feedback on the current content of the Museum’s Crossroads exhibition, including omissions and inaccuracies related to underrepresented groups.

Samira Rivera and Jair Ramirez, Aquí en Chicago interns and Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy (IJLA) alumni do interpretive work with the IJLA students’ protest posters in Fall 2021.

seeking ways to better engage younger audiences of color. In addition, of course, your students have the expertise from your class to analyze museum work. My work on Aquí has brought me close to the stories of students whose protest forms the heart of the exhibition.

One of our methods for honoring and inhabiting the experience of the students from Rudy Lozano/IJLA has been to include young Latino/a/x people in this project in as many ways as possible. Thanks to a grant from Bank of America, Latino/a/x high schoolers from around the area will be interning on the project as researchers in the summers leading up to the opening. We have also been fortunate to bring in MA and PhD students onto the project during the academic year in a similar capacity. The project with your students is different, in that they are working mostly on Crossroads rather than Aquí and doing evaluation rather than research, but I feel that this is a very resonant way that we can take the practices and lessons from Aquí and use them in other ways throughout the Museum. That’s one of the benefits of my new position, and I’m delighted that these students have a place to participate in shaping the CHM of their generation.

The students recognize the power and responsibility of museums such as CHM. Were there any areas of consensus or overarching themes that rose to the surface? Can you share a bit about what we’ll encounter when we read the reactions and analysis of the students?

And how do you think the students have felt about the assignment and participating in this process?

EO: Yes, in fact, I began this and many other classes by discussing the importance of dynamic language. This is something I learned from my advisor Kirsten Pai Buick at the University of New Mexico. The idea behind dynamic language is to allow for some running themes and ideas to be placed in the realm of the process. For instance, one major concern with this class was the idea of authenticity. More specifically, the ways in which we interact with it in museums. How important is it to encounter authentic objects in the museum? For what reason? Who benefits from this authenticity? etc.

However, in order to ask these questions we had to change our mindset from authenticity to authentication.

This is what I meant by talking about dynamic language. We don’t speak about authenticity but about authentication; we Critical Museum Observation | 9

after the pandemic. There was a need for social interaction, and it shows. Normally small classes of undergraduate students tend to be a bit quiet. Many are fresh from high school and are only beginning to find their voices in the classroom. However, this group was different, and after talking to you about the possibility of sharing their voices with your visitors, I knew this was the best group.

I am eager to see the ways in which you integrate the opinions from school communities. While I see an attempt from many museums to try to integrate surrounding communities in the conversation, you seem to come from a much more critical standpoint. Can you tell me how you blend your academic and social justice practices into spaces such as CHM?

Jair Ramirez, Aquí en Chicago intern and Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy alumnus, explores the Akido Tsuda collection at Harold Washington Library in Fall 2021.

don’t speak about identity but about identification. That way we can formulate questions in terms of process. For instance, who authenticates and for what reason? Who has historically profited from authentication? For whom do we authenticate? That way you avoid anchoring ideas to one single answer and instead, you are pushed to investigate process. So, in order to arrive at your project, we explored the history of museums and exhibitions from these types of critical standpoints. By the time we formulated the questions presented here, we already had an idea how authenticity functions. For that reason, a lot of the answers center on this theme.

Another major theme that came about in a more organic way was the issue of representation. Without directly addressing the erasure of minoritized communities from museums around the world, we always understood the historical processes of exclusivity and inclusivity affecting these institutions. One of the assignments was to visit an encyclopedic museum and see how they attempt to represent the world. I asked them to look at the labels, the display props, the text, and even the colors of the walls. I was surprised by how learning about the history of exclusion enabled many students to observe curatorial practices of exclusion. Again, always thinking about the process.

This is, without a doubt, my most outspoken class to date. We engaged in such generative conversations that going to class was always a joy. I feel like there was a shift 10 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

EG: I’ve never thought about the process of authentication as you described it—in terms of the process itself— though it is so central to the way the museum confers value, through the “museum effect” as Svetlana Alpers put it.5 It’s fascinating how your class entered through this idea. Visiting the class, I also found the students to be exceptionally outspoken and engaged, as you suggested, which made the class fun, interesting, and energizing.

I knew it would be so exciting to hear from them in this venue!

Integrating students’ voices in curatorial work generally and in Aquí, my current project, specifically is a challenge for several reasons. Students are often only able to focus on the curatorial work to the extent that it takes place within a class. So, for example, the students from Rudy Lozano/IJLA protested CHM within the context of their classroom work with their history teacher. They took that initiative and did a great deal of work, but once the class was complete, most of them moved on to other things. In addition, we learned quickly that there are barriers to participation by teens in work at CHM. We’ve worked to remove as many of these barriers as possible (offering paid internships with hybrid work schedules and support with transportation and food while working on site) and to clearly identify those we can’t remove (such as background checks and vaccine mandates) so that young people can make informed choices about seeking employment at CHM. We were fortunate to engage with some students and alumni from Rudy/IJLA in 2021. One alumnus, Jair Ramirez, still sits on our Advisory Committee for Aquí, and we are eager to welcome other students and alumni from Rudy/IJLA into the project at any time, either as advisors or as interns on the project.

Those two vehicles—the Community Advisory Committee, which consults on every part of the project, and the internship program for Latino/a/x people ages 16–20—are the ones we are using to include students’ voices in Aquí. Since high school students started us off

Community Advisory Committee

Community Awareness Council

Rosa Cabrera

Maria Drell

Grisel Acosta

Carlos Brossard

Ivelisse Díaz

Myrna García

Deborah Kanter

Lilia Fernández

Daysi Funes

Guillermo García

Rudy Lozano Jr.

Nicole Marroquín

Alex Alejandra Garza

Luis Gutierrez

Carlos Hernández-Falcon

Rafael Núñez

Ernesto Saldivar

Jacqui Lazú

José López

Vanessa Sánchez

Antonio Santos

Mireya Loza

Omar Magaña

Antonio Ramírez

Gladys de la Torre

Ester Trujillo

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Samira Rivera, Aquí en Chicago intern and Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy alumna, researches murals in the Lower West Side neighborhood of Pilsen with local expert and guide Luis Tubens in Fall 2021.

on the path toward Aquí en Chicago, it felt necessary to ensure that they could contribute throughout. We immediately sought funding to support this inclusion of young people. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has generously supported the planning for Aquí, and this includes some compensation for our Advisory Committee, including students. We’re also grateful to the Illinois Arts Council for supporting our summer 2022 intern cohort and Bank of America for supporting the cohorts of summer interns from 2023 to 2025. Paying students and young people is crucial to their ability to participate, and there are several students who could not participate even with the stipend because the Museum could not offer a full-time schedule or work beyond the summer months. The type of paid internship we’re offering is a baby step toward changing the overall pipeline of preparation for museum professionals so that we can truly diversify the field. We are absolutely thrilled to work with young people throughout this project, but we feel very humble about still not having the ability to overcome the barriers between some underserved young folks and work at CHM. 12 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

That being said, we’re proud of the internship program for Aquí. Following two small pilot cohorts in 2021 and 2022, the program will enable eight young people to work on the project for each of three summers leading up to the opening in October 2025. Our interns for 2023 have already been selected. One of the original goals of the students at Rudy/IJLA was always to build a movement of Latino/a/x youth across the city to work on the inclusion of Latino history in the history of the city.

To that end, we will be seeking applicants for the program from around the metro area and bringing them together to create new research and programming at CHM. In summer 2023 and 2024, the interns will work with Curatorial Department staff, including me, to complete research projects on the topics of their choice within our storyline. They will write finished projects that will ultimately influence our label writing for the exhibition. Their choices of images and of objects may also make their way into the exhibition. In summer 2025, interns will be working with the Education Department on public programming to support the exhibition. This is a very important area because there

are many topics that either cannot be addressed within the gallery because of space constraints or complexity.

Programming is one of the ways in which the Museum becomes a forum for public conversations.

The second part of your question, about how I blend my academic and social justice practices into spaces such as CHM, is very important to me. It’s at the heart of my work. For me, the purpose of my academic research is to put it into practice. And my practice takes place in the space of the museum. For me, research and the theoretical concerns of academia are very utilitarian. I see them as tools to be used in our collaborative work for social justice. If we want to see the equitable distribution of risks and rewards in society, we need all of the available tools to make that happen. The museum—any museum, including CHM—is a venue where we can work to equitably distribute rewards such as representation. It is also a tool in and of itself that we can use to address inequities all throughout society by providing historical context and examples, powerful stories, and an examination of the effects of different strategies for creating change throughout history.

I was very impressed by your curatorial work in the recent exhibition you organized for the University Art Museum at New Mexico State University, Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium.6 Even though social justice wasn’t necessarily mentioned in the introduction to the exhibition, it came out as a theme for me. How were you and your collaborators thinking about social justice as you shaped the exhibition? As you consider our various curatorial experiences and your students’

work on Crossroads, what are your hopes for your students? What are your hopes for the Crossroads exhibition and Aquí en Chicago?

EO: Thank you, Elena. This exhibition was a great effort from many people. This is the first time I put such a large show together. My main goal was to make this exhibition as collaborative as possible. In essence, Contemporary ExVotos sought to highlight the life of ex-votos from the nineteenth-century to the present. We commissioned fifteen artists to respond to NMSU’s collection. Ex-votos (for context) are votive paintings made by unknown artists throughout Mexico from the seventeenth century to the present. The process of creating one of these images was community based. The images sought to tell the story of a supplicant, their journey, and the ways they aimed to give gratitude to a specific saint and/or deity.

Patrons worked alongside artists, and their placement in public Catholic sanctuaries opened a communal space of healing. It was precisely that communal process that we wanted to replicate.

I organized a class here at UIC where students interacted with students and staff from the NMSU art museum. We learned a lot from them, and together we made sense of the importance of this exhibition, and the opportunity it represented in changing the narrative surrounding the erasure of ex-votos from major art canonical texts and conversations. As such, the final product was the result of a collaboration between students, artists, museum staff, scholars, and myself. In fact, two of my PhD students ended up co-curating one

Installation and opening of the Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium exhibition at the University Art Museum at New Mexico State University organized by Emmanuel Ortega.

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Kids enjoying the Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium exhibition.

Ariella Santoyo, co-owner of My Quince World, whose oral history has been collected as part of the Aquí en Chicago project.

of the galleries. Students from my class at UIC did a lot of research and worked on translating a lot of the text from the ex-votos. In the end, we curated three galleries, and many of the contemporary artists, with these communal ideas in mind, replicated the spaces of memory and healing needed to house new and old work.

Working closely with all parties involved in this process, including artists, students, and museum professionals, was not only a different form of curating but a way of championing social justice. I feel we were very successful in including and educating many students, and, in the end, I hope we were able to redeem the complicated and tumultuous history behind the ways we have erased ex14 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

votos from the larger history of art in Mexico. To me that is a form of social justice.

My hope for Aquí is similar. I loved the fact that social movements and organizing are the main factors driving your practice, Elena. I know this will be reflected in the final product. One of the issues behind many museums around the country is the fact that they pretend to reflect the needs of the communities they serve by way of curating. However, more often than not, museums are indebted to their institutional legacies and unweaving those historical patterns necessitates ongoing work. By introducing a new permanent exhibition via a dialogue between the Museum and the communities that it is meant to serve, you are already subverting these traditional legacies, this has the potential to create a model for many museums to follow. As museums around the country reckon with their historical collections and how to display them, Contemporary Ex-Votos exposed the power of new generations of artists, students, and scholars to scrutinize the material culture embedded with colonial violence. I think that Crossroads is doing something similar; reshaping the narrative that is told about the formation of the city, the labor, and the culture that maintains it.

With this in mind, how do you envision your process to have a larger impact in curatorial practices? Also, I’ll return the question back to you, what are your hopes for this exhibition and the role you want it to play in the communal memory of Latinx populations of Chicago?

Embroidered detail of a garment worn by Gladys de la Torre of the Kichwa Community of Chicago. Gladys, along with Moises Amaguana, had their oral histories collected for Aquí en Chicago.

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A June 2023 Museum collaboration occurred in partnership with the Gage Park Latinx Council Community Archive, where CHM director of collections Julie Wroblewski shared the best ways to store and care for family history items.

EG: If there’s one thing I can say about the process I’ve been going through with Aquí, and I think it extends to Crossroads as well, it’s that it is S-L-O-W. And that’s by design. That’s intentional. My hope in terms of influencing curatorial practices in general (if I could wave a magic wand) would be this: first, that all curators in all types of museums consider their projects in terms of how they could help better distribute risks and reward in society—how they could use their projects for social justice, especially in terms of environmental justice and antiracist work. Secondly, though, we need to think about how to do this type of work. My experience from these and other projects is that it should be slow and careful work that privileges human interaction and sustainability (not rushing and getting burnt out in our work and racing on to the next thing). Giving ourselves time to make all the necessary connections to potential collaborators across many different communities is the bedrock of building respectful relationships and, therefore, having something meaningful to say. It is not respectful to come to someone last minute and ask them to jump on a project and do lots of work. I often talk 16 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

about the word “curate” meaning “care” and all of the different types of care that goes into this work. The most important form of care in curatorial work is caring for people and other nonhuman life on this planet. That’s why we’re here in the first place. So, within that work of caring for people and building respectful relationships that allow communities’ stories to emerge in museum settings, I would say plan to take the time. The process is often the product.

Aquí is a great example of that. I’m so excited to actually open the exhibition—to be ready to open the exhibition.

But the exhibition is not the purpose of the work we’re doing at CHM and with our partners. The purpose of the work is to build up the musculature of the relationship between CHM and the Latino/a/x third of the city so that CHM can be a respectful and trusted storyteller of the city as a whole—a storyteller that regularly includes stories about, by, and for these communities and many others.

So, the exhibition, Aquí en Chicago, is one step on the way to building this relationship. Like decolonization, the process will never be complete. Like any relationship, it will need ongoing nurturing to flourish. But my hope is

Students from Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy (Instituto Justice Leadership Academy) with teacher Anton Miglietta gather for a group photo in their classroom.

that after several years of sustained work on this specific project, during which we open Aquí, Latino populations around Chicago will begin to feel seen within Chicago history and will begin to feel that CHM is one worthy custodian of that communal memory for generations to come. I also hope that the alumni from Rudy/IJLA who initiated this project and their peers have some of their questions answered about their communities’ histories and feel that CHM could be a welcoming place to begin further research into their areas of interest. The work we’re doing in Aquí is a microcosm of the much larger project we’re taking on with the planning for Crossroads. And it extends well beyond Latino communities of Chicago to build many more relationships and tell stories that cross cultural boundaries of all kinds to build an inclusive history of the city.

On behalf of the Museum, thank you and your students so much for engaging in this experiment in critical museum observation. We’re very fortunate to learn from their experiences in the Museum. Let’s see what they have to say!

of the Chicago History Museum Education Department and Elena Gonzales. 8, top: courtesy of Routledge - Taylor & Francis Group. 11, courtesy of the Community Advisory Committee and Community Awareness Council members.

13, courtesy of NMSU Art Museum; photograph by Marcus Chormicle. 14, top: courtesy of NMSU Art Museum; photograph by Marcus Chormicle. 17, courtesy of and photograph by Anton Miglietta, Teacher, Instituto Justice Leadership Academy - Rudy Lozano Campus.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are taken by Chicago History Museum staff unless otherwise specified. Page 5, top: courtesy of Elena Gonzales, photograph by Ben Gonzales; courtesy of Emmanuel Ortega, photograph by Emmanuel Ramos-Barajas; bottom: courtesy of and photograph by Anton Miglietta, Teacher, Instituto Justice Leadership Academy - Rudy Lozano Campus. 6‒7, courtesy

5. Svetlana Alpers, “Museums as a Way of Seeing,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Steven D. Lavine and Ivan Karp (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).

E N D N OT E S 1. See “History, Mission, & Values,” Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy, bit.ly/3MFi4Ni. 2. See “Charles E. Bethea,” Chicago History Museum, www.chicagohistory.org/ pressroom/charles-bethea.

3. See “CHM Staff Spotlight: Rebekah Coffman,” Chicago History Museum, blog, https://www.chicagohistory.org/staff-spotlightrebekah-coffman/.

4. Elena Gonzales, Exhibitions for Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2019). https://www.routledge.com/Exhibitions-for-SocialJustice/Gonzales/p/ book/9781138292598.

6. “Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium,” New Mexico State University, https://uam.nmsu.edu/ exhibitions/exhibitionpages/contemporaryexvoto/contemporaryexvoto.html.

Critical Museum Observation | 17

QUESTION 1:.

Based on your visit to the Museum, what are the most pressing themes that can help the diversification of narratives in the Chicago History Museum?

Diversifying Narratives at the Chicago History Museum CELIA DOHERTY, JASMINE HARRISON, ANTONIO IRIZARRY, DANIELA JIMENEZ, MEG MAGENNIS, DORMIANN MARIE OTOKO, AND KATHLEEN ROGOZINSKI

n recent decades, American museums, in terms of how they are understood by the public and their internal motives have evolved from being widely collection-based establishments to being educational institutions. Museums have a history of inward focus, such as the curation and study of their vast collections.

However, new directions have led museums much further outward, with a shifted focus on providing the public with educational and engaging narratives. As summarized by Stephen E. Weil, the American museum has shifted from being about something to being for somebody.1 The Chicago History Museum’s challenge, then, is to further engage the city’s diverse population and weave its complexities—and complex histories— into the narratives it tells.

According to a 2001 public opinion survey commissioned by the American Alliance of Museums, “museums are considered the most trustworthy source of information in America, rated higher than local papers, nonprofit researchers, the US government, or academic researchers.”2 The concept of a “good” museum has changed. It is no longer defined by vast collections and huge buildings, but what it can provide for the public and the education system.

To fulfill its crucial role in the community, the Chicago History Museum should be acutely aware of its responsibilities as such an institution. A museum is also a distinct tool of power. We know the importance of representation in education. When modes of education are situated within familiar frames of reference for museum visitors, they are much more meaningful and effective.

Furthermore, the lack of appropriate representation is definitively harmful to groups that are not represented. The Museum can thus diversify narratives through culturally responsive education, an approach that incorporates

I

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The “This is Chicago, this is America” display along with a neighborhood map of the city was designed as part of the Sweet Home Chicago section of Crossroads, portraying waves of migration and immigration to Chicago.

individuals’ cultural identities and lived experiences into pedagogies as tools for effective instruction.

There are commonalities among different cultural narratives that appear in the Chicago History Museum, for instance, in stories of why immigrants settled in Chicago.

As an example, the Pritzker family, featured on the first floor of the Museum, was a Russian Jewish family that chose to migrate to the United States to escape religious and political mistreatment in their country. Despite differing obstacles, this is a common narrative of those who chose to settle in Chicago. Nevertheless, the prosperity of the Pritzker family is less common.

Further, one of the few places Latino and Asian immigrants are mentioned in the Museum is in the “This is Chicago, this is America” display. This is also one of the few places in Chicago: Crossraods of America where Spanish appears, with a picture labeled “Mexican Independence Day” and two Day of the Dead artifacts in a case below,

Assistant state’s attorney Harry Pritzker, son of immigrants Annie P. (née Cohn) and Nicholas J. Pritzker, photographed in Chicago for the Chicago Daily News in 1925.

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Part of the “This is Chicago, this is America” display in Crossroads, this photograph shows spectators waiting for the Mexican Independence Day Parade to pass at 87th Street and Houston Avenue on September 6, 1987.

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This display, featuring publishing, toys, housewares, and food products that originated in Chicago, is part of Second to None, one of five main thematic sections in the Crossroads exhibition.

with no accompanying explanation of the history of the culture from which these holidays come. Though many Mexican immigrants moved to Chicago to reside in one of the few remaining sanctuary cities, it wasn’t only Mexican immigrants who arrived during this time period, but, rather, immigrants from all over Latin America. However, this breadth of Latin American cultures is not portrayed in the exhibition. For there to be a diversification of narratives, the Museum needs to showcase the stories of the Latinos who came here with the dream of creating a better life for themselves, just as the Pritzker family did, by contributing to the infrastructure of America through assisting in the building of railroads, bridges, skyscrapers, canals, highways, and airports, and having a cultural impact that can be seen today in many ways, through street art, restaurants, music, street vendors, and more.

Walking through Chicago: Crossroads of America As one walks through an exhibition in a museum, the ritual of being presented with an object, reading its label, and rhythmically progressing toward the next object can render effortless the experience of getting lost in the novelty of newfound knowledge or the admiration of an object. One would assume that, were the objects on display to bear an inherent relationship to the viewer themselves, it would be even easier to find connection in such an encounter. However, even lifelong residents of

Chicago, whose families are proud of having immigrated to the city, may struggle to find connection in Crossroads or the Chicago History Museum. Even though the Sears Tower and Cubs jerseys are familiar icons, their place in the exhibition as objects seems only to assert that they are the authentic relics of Chicago’s history and culture.

That is, there is dissonance between an individual’s own history as a Spanish-speaking Latino, or a member of any underrepresented group, and the history of Chicago presented in Crossroads. The Chicago that visitors encounter is a romanticization of Chicago’s historical economic elite, presented through material culture.

This could be considered what Michel Foucault called a “heterotopia,” which he describes as “a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live.”3 Heterotopias are spaces that mirror the outside world, but are also contradictory to or incompatible with it.

That is to say, the Chicago that visitors encounter in Crossroads is a capitalist utopia. It presents a suffocating centralization of an idealized narrative of Chicago, as well as the exclusion of the complex “unsightly” historical narratives of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). Many of us and countless others were simply not a part of the city that is being celebrated in the exhibition. Walking through the space evoked a feeling of being an interloper viewing the city from outside, an Diversifying Naratives | 21

aberrant visitor who could only be a part of the “true” beauty of Chicago from a distance.

Regardless of curatorial intent, Crossroads places the narratives of Spanish-speaking people outside of the history of Chicago. This is accomplished by the authentication of a unilineal4 history of Chicago that is characterized by a capitalist heterotopia, as well as by appealing to a Black-white paradigm and placing BIPOC as passive and content residents within it. Before a conversation around how to disrupt this process can take place, we must further identify the violence in the material culture of Crossroads, in both its subject matter and its presentation.

Unilineal History via the Illusion of Progress Crossroads asserts a narrative of Chicago’s history that is rooted in a problematic illusion of “inevitable progress,” which implicates Chicago’s residents as either a part of that progress or spectators to it. It is here, shrouded in this illusion of progress, that we characterize the unilineal nature of the history that is made “authentic” throughout the exhibition, and this is best summarized by text displayed near the entrance to its first section: “Rivers, railroads, bridges, skyscrapers canals, highways, and airports were the sinews of a new urban life that continues to evolve and astonish the world. . . . They marveled at the relentless engine of commerce, the brash determination of its citizens, and the city’s embrace of innovation and creativity. . . .

Chicago is the most American of American cities.”5 The notion of a singular line of social evolution is especially forceful in making authentic the narrative of Chicago presented in the exhibition. Alluding to scientific theory, in a space such as a museum, on a plaque preceding an onslaught of capitalist cheerleading, promises to visitors that what follows is objective—even scientific—evidence of what material culture contributes to (and by omission, what does not contribute to) Chicago as the “most American” city. This plaque also establishes that this “most American” material culture consists of: railroads, airports, commerce, etc. The themes that make up the evolution, or progress, of Chicago are in line with capitalist notions of progress: industry, revenue, and commercial innovation.

The dialogue that follows in Crossroads continues to authenticate this unilineal narrative—that Chicago embodies an American city through its industrial advancements and economic presence, through convenient omission of the violence that was and continues to be perpetuated by these industries, as well as by ignoring the elements of Chicago’s culture that have not contributed to the city’s capitalist successes. Both My Kind of Town and Second to None, sections that represent 22 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

nearly half of Crossroads’s square footage, feature displays that are overwhelmingly in service of authenticating the depiction of Chicago as defined by its economic, consumerist successes. Quotations from various historical figures fitting this narrative, such as Marshall Field and Eugene Wigner, are displayed in a way that furthers the heterotopic profoundness of the illusion of progress, and disingenuously omits their original complex context.

“Give the lady what she wants! Marshall Field, c. 1895,” in tandem with the reference to his innovations in the retail space as “catering to affluent [read: white] women” frames Marshall Field as an altruistic, perhaps even progressive or feminist, innovator, when the quote more accurately represents the inception of a misogynistic assertion of women’s place as consumers in the retail space.6 The high fashion displayed here was not a part of many of the cultural narratives in Chicago’s history. The same can be said of the heterotopic idealization of Chicago architecture. While the downtown skyline has indeed come to be iconic of the city’s landscape, the insistence around the technological and mathematical innovations of skyscrapers funded and designed by a very specific economic class, while excluding any significant conversation around the architecture of Chicago outside of downtown, both silences other epistemologies of architecture as well as perpetuates the idea of the “other” as underapplying and inactive in the landscape of the city. It is no far reach to say that for Boricuas, for example, the steel Puerto Rican flags on Division Street represent more of their narratives in Chicago than, say, the Reliance Building.

Displays speaking to baseball as a part of Chicago’s history, legitimized by the inclusion of a random segment of fence or a wooden bat, rarely deviate from the franchises of the Cubs and Sox. While both teams are obvious elements of Chicago’s baseball culture, one can question whether, say, the number of hotdogs sold in a given season at Wrigley Field is more culturally relevant to Chicago than, say, Roberto Clemente, who despite never having played for either Chicago franchise (and therefore never contributed to a World Series win, the “end goal” of baseball as defined here) has been an inspirational figure for countless Puerto Ricans, especially in Humboldt Park. After all, the purpose of playing baseball is to win championships and pennant titles. Furthermore, any deviations from the Cubs and Sox in this display can only be found at kneeheight, literally and symbolically below the large parts of baseball history that appeal to the “most American” narrative. Respective, small plaques, accompanied by a few small objects, sit as quaint detours to speak to Black and women’s baseball history, but both texts make sure to establish Black and women’s baseball leagues as having “died” or been “put to an end” by the then white-maledominated Major League.7

Crowds line the streets as the 27th annual Puerto Rican Day Parade proceeds down Dearborn Street in the Loop on June 13, 1992.

These items from Chicago’s baseball history are currently on display in Crossroads. As the students note, the content related to women’s baseball and Black baseball is found at the bottom of the case.

Diversifying Naratives | 23

BIPOC as Passive Residents of Segregation and the Black-White Paradigm The label discussing Black baseball’s history in Chicago is also symptomatic of the lack of diversification of the narratives in Crossroads via the perpetuation of the white-nonwhite simplification of racial inequality, and by an insistence that BIPOC throughout Chicago’s history have been both passive in its inequality and content within it.

The label quickly glosses over the “denial of access” to the major leagues Black Americans faced, and conveniently ignores how the same political powers and entities that embodied the “progress” of Chicago were also perpetuators of both de jure and de facto segregation. Most relevant to a discussion toward diversifying narratives, however, is the plaque’s tokenistic inclusion. The short, out-of-theway nature of the label reduces conversations of race into two sections, the “main” Chicago history that just so happens to be dominantly white, and the “other.” A display recounting the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to Chicago asserts that this singular event “made Chicago into a biracial city,” and erases the presence of cultural groups that do not fit into the categories of white or African American.8

This tokenization continues in the previously mentioned “This is Chicago, this is America” display. In addition to the Mexican Day of the Dead figurines, the “Global Treasures” include Vietnamese model instruments, Asian Indian ankle and hand bells, and a lucky horseshoe from Poland, which presumably are supposed to represent these four distinct cultures. This blatantly disingenuous attempt to represent the vast number of ethnic groups that make up a majority of the city9 and are a part of its history is apparent when one compares the amount of space it is given in relation to the space given to the Crate & Barrel or Edgewater Beach Hotel displays. [Editor’s note: Since the students’ visit, the Global Treasures case was deinstalled in fall 2022. As part of the Broadening Narratives work at the Chicago History Museum, visitors may see signage and other changes in Crossroads indicating the evaluative work taking place.]

The layout of Crossroads contributes to this oversimplified conversation around Chicago’s racial diversity.

The Sweet Home Chicago section, on top of physically separating conversations of race from the illusion of progress, reduces BIPOC and their narratives to the defining lines of Chicago’s racially and economically segregated neighborhoods, and implicates them as responsible.

“The contours of the city have been shaped by successive waves of people from various parts of the US and other nations. . . . In making the city their home, they have formed strong communities, but they have often been deeply divided by race, ethnicity, religion, and class, divisions reinforced by the Chicago River, which separates the city into North, South, and West Sides, and by numerous rail lines, highways, . . . as well as psychological barriers.”10

The full label discussing the Great Migration in the “This is Chicago, this is America” display in Crossroads.

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Here we see a notable difference in the conversations around white vs. BIPOC communities and their relationships with the landscape of Chicago. White, wealthy innovators are active participants in shaping the landscape, with skyscrapers, airports, and other successes of industry. Meanwhile, BIPOC communities are passively influenced by both Chicago’s natural and industrial landscape. The vague sentiment of “psychological barriers” is attributed to the toxic misconception that Chicago’s historically segregated structure is the result of people simply wishing to “stay with each other” or “take care of our own,” and gravitating toward communities with similar languages. While living near family may be a core value to many people, and there very well may be people who consciously decide to reside in communities most like themselves, this simplistic justification ignores the history of redlining and contract-buying schemes at the hands of the people who represent the illusion of progress in Chicago.

Now removed from Crossroads, this case contained the “global treasures” that many of the students found to be decontextualized and othering, rather than integrated into the story of Chicago.

This explanation, especially in context with the lack of representation of other narratives, also reduces the myriad communities in Chicago as simply differentenough from one another. The only agency left to the visitor in their interpretation of the diverse communities in the city is to ruminate on where they sit from one another geographically. This silence is directly deleterious to opening a dialogue around the diverse histories and epistemologies that are and have always been a part of Chicago.

Disrupting the Unilineal Narrative of Progress and Diversifying the Conversation An important distinction to make in attempts to disrupt the colonial processes that are continued by these and other examples within the Chicago History Museum is that simply attempting to move in the opposite direction can have an equally adverse effect. If the narrative shifts

to centralize the history of violence in Chicago, then the conversation regresses to reducing Chicago’s cultures to their violence and trauma. If we overaccentuate the political and social pressures that have bred Chicago’s segregated geography, then the truths of intersectionality alongside Chicago’s individual diversity become overshadowed by the victimization of BIPOC. The process of diversifying the narratives of the Chicago History Museum must first be characterized by a redefinition of the Museum’s audience. In its current form, Crossroads most seeks to appeal to a visitor looking to autoauthenticate their visit to, or existence within, Chicago. This “Chicago,” however, is based on the perception of itself as the “City of Big Shoulders,” characterized by giant skyscrapers and fast-talking, faster-walking businessmen, and is an antiquated and dishonest mirage that does not hold up to close inspection or to other communities in Chicago that do not fit that perception.

Diversifying Naratives | 25

As part of ongoing work for the Aquí en Chicago project at the Museum, oral histories are being collected around the city, including here at Adalberto United Methodist Church where Elvira Arellano was interviewed.

Thus, the Chicago History Museum should strive to interpret themselves through Chicago’s residents first and foremost, by first rejecting the unilineal illusion of progress that Crossroads prioritizes.

The most obvious method of rejecting the illusion of progress, and the process by which it silences the epistemologies of BIPOC, is to eliminate the insistence of exhibiting Chicago through the lens of consumerism and capitalist innovations. This material culture may very well be a part of the historical conversation, but defining these objects as authentic artifacts of progress reinforces the two sides of the heterotopia: the products of progress vs. the other.

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Thus, in order to present more diverse narratives of Chicago, the Museum must avoid constricting the material culture through preconceived themes, especially those that seek to create artifacts where there are none.

Dialogue, in both the figurative and literal sense, can present more accessible and honest (not neutral!) familial and cultural histories in a way that projecting nostalgia onto objects as artifacts cannot. Spoken words, interviews, or oral histories as an open platform for Chicago’s communities to share their diverse stories stand out as a potential starting point for this conversation.

Furthermore, state violence in a broad sense, both by means of legislature and law enforcement, has been a

cornerstone of colonialization for centuries. Ignorance of it is simply disingenuous, but it is important to avoid reducing the life histories of the people in Chicago to their victimization in the colonial struggle. It is a difficult balance to be sure. However, future exhibitions should engage in an open dialogue with the communities and individuals who are most impacted by these colonial processes and should take special care in understanding how future exhibitions present these people without othering via romanticizing their victimization.

Conclusion To incorporate more diversity into their narrative of Chicago history, the Chicago History Museum should base their exhibitions on the reality of what Chicago has been since its inception. The Museum needs to face the underlying theme of racism that saturates Chicago’s history and be radically honest on what and who has built Chicago into the city it is today. It is common to hear that Chicago is a “melting pot” of individuals from every race and ethnicity, but this “diversity” doesn’t stop the city from continuing to be segregated even to this day.

The Museum should show how institutional racism within Chicago has led to redlining, segregation, and increased incarceration rates for minorities both within and beyond the white-Black paradigm.

To avoid victimizing narratives, the Museum could incorporate narratives that center people. For example, rather than simply highlighting industry growth, they could explain how those industries were run on the backbone of immigrants (legal and illegal) who were not being paid adequately enough for their labor. Or the Museum could provide more spaces for visitors to connect history to how those events continue to affect them today. For example, though women’s suffrage is covered in the Museum’s Facing Freedom in America exhibition, women still experience disenfranchisement today.

The Crossroads exhibition provides a framework for a culturally responsive experience, but it is currently underdeveloped. It is not sufficient to represent a group that makes up nearly 29% of the city’s population with fewer than a dozen references throughout the entire Museum. A fuller history is needed—the first major wave of Mexican immigration to Chicago began in the 1910s. Latinx history can be intertwined with the other stories told by the Museum—visitors should be shown the roles and experiences of more than the white and African American demographics throughout the history of the city. A good starting point for more inclusive and accurate narratives in the exhibition would be to start with the stories already being told in the Museum, currently from a unilineal perspective, and incorporate the voices from the groups that helped to build the city into what it is today. For example, the creation of the

city’s railroads is credited to primarily Irish immigrants, but the contributions of Mexican traqueros are not recognized.

The museum today, as a notion and an institution, is one of the most widely trusted education systems in the world. Whether this is fair or not, confidence is given to museums that they are providing communities with unbiased and representative information.

This creates a role for both the Chicago History Museum and for us, the public, the visitors to the Museum, to hold. For the Museum, it must be thoroughly aware of the responsibility entrusted to it. For us, the visitors and students, we must hold the Museum accountable to uphold culturally responsible narratives.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are taken by Chicago History Museum staff unless otherwise specified. 19, DN0079806, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum. 20, Chicago History Museum, ICHi-036600; Antonio Perez, photographer. 23, top: ST-19040908-0033, Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum.

E N D N OT E S 1. Stephen E. Weil, “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 128 (1999): 229–58.

2. Philip Kennicott, “Is it a Museum or Not? The Question is Worth Asking,” Washington Post, October 12, 2018. www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/is-it-a-museum-or-not-thequestion-is-worth-asking/2018/10/12/54eded68-c5c1-11e89b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html 3. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Translated from Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, no. 5 (1984): 46–49. https://foucault.info/ documents/heterotopia/ foucault.heteroTopia.en/ 4. Unilineal evolution is an idea from nineteenth century social theory that human society has moved from a primitive state to its pinnacle, most civilized state, in Western culture.

5. Chicago History Museum, Chicago: Crossroads of America, 2006.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. See the 2020 census, in which 45.3% of Chicago’s population reported their race as white alone. Other racial categories breakdown as follows: 29.2% Black or African American alone, 28.7% Hispanic or Latino, 7.4% two or more races, 6.8% Asian alone, 0.5% American Indian and Alaska Native alone. “Quick Facts: Chicago city, Illinois,” United States Census Bureau, 2020. www.census.gov/quickfacts/chicagocityillinois 10. Chicago History Museum, Crossroads of America, 2006.

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QUESTION 2:.

Based on your visit to the Museum, and considering the objects displayed, what other objects do you think would help nuance the Latino experience in Chicago?

Using Objects to Share Latino Experiences in Chicago M. ASHLEY BOLEY, JAILINE GOMEZ-MENDOZA, JUAN NAJERA, AND RAVI PATEL

hroughout the Chicago History Museum’s exhibitions, there is a common approach of allowing history to be interactive, enabling viewers to learn history in an immersive way.

Facing Freedom in America, the exhibition on the first floor, shows multiple perspectives of general US history, ranging from women’s voting rights—which the online exhibition Democracy Limited: Chicago Women and the Vote also explores—to the Civil Rights Movement to Japanese internment camps. The Museum also displays a broad selection of artifacts and objects that purport to represent Chicago and showcase the cultures engraved in the city.

Multiple exhibitions feature artifacts with tremendous historical significance. For instance, City on Fire successfully captures the essence of the catastrophe of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 through objects that survived the Fire and those that were irrevocably damaged, while also demonstrating how post-Fire recovery was the basis of the industrial empire that Chicago has turned into. The tremendous work of creating the new buildings and architecture of Chicago, as well as how the city has pivoted into what it is now, is a story worth telling.

However, once one further explores the second-floor exhibitions, the history of Chicago becomes clearly onesided. There is representation of white voices along with a small number of Black Chicagoans, but there seems to be a complete disconnect with the narrative of the Latino experience in Chicago.

A simple internet search shows that nearly 29 percent of Chicago’s population is Latino.1 This makes the omission of their history glaring. Since a bold group of students from Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy called out the Museum for having a lack of Latino history, a project has been in the works that includes a full exhibition. The need for a full exhibition can be felt in this quote from one of the students: “It’s more than just

T

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an exhibit,” [Karina] Valadez said. “We’re tired of not seeing our history represented in textbooks. We deserve to be remembered. Right now we don’t feel part of Chicago’s history. If we don’t know who we are, how are we supposed to know how to move forward?”2 Latino/a/x communities have been a part of Chicago history for many years, and their experiences as well as significant events affecting Latino culture more broadly are part of Chicago’s history.

As one makes their way throughout the exhibitions, one can sense the approach that the Chicago History Museum took. Using artifacts to further contextualize history creates an interactive environment for those who are not familiar with Chicago’s history. The Museum intended its narratives to be palatable. Nevertheless, through this process the histories being shared become censored. In Facing Freedom, the exhibition content highlights actions that different groups took against various harships they faced. Whether it be the hunger strikes by Dolores Huerta to Japanese internment camps, these are stories of specific events that are part of US history. The overgeneralization takes place, however, when the women’s suffrage movement is highlighted, and does not note that the focus is on white women’s suffrage or that not all women were enfranchised with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.3 The Chicago History Museum was originally established in 1856 as the Chicago Historical Society. When seen in that context it becomes easier to under why community representation is so important. The title implies a powerful authenticity of the information the Museum provides to Chicago’s communities. So, when the Museum fails a group of people, they contribute to a much larger picture of systematic racism and xenophobia, and create a sense of othering and marginalization which is particularly damaging to minorities and communities of color.

This display in Facing Freedom in America contains artifacts from and discusses the women’s suffrage movement in Illinois, one of eight movements featured in the exhibition.

Using Objects to Share Experiences | 29

This portion of Crossroads describes the 1673 excursion of Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet as an exploration in which they claimed land for France, rather than centering the Indigenous inhabitants of the region.

The rhetoric is a large part of the issue because it seeps through every corner to ensure people feel the exclusion.

An example would be the verbiage used to describe the fur trade with Native Americans during early colonization in Chicago: Crossroads of America. On a diagram in the section on Native Americans, referring to the colonization of future US citizens and the opposing British forces at the time, it states that Europeans “ended up” in Illinois, and then Chicago went under French control temporarily, but the text makes no mention of colonization and its effects on the Indigenous inhabitants. By omitting important pieces of information, history becomes whitewashed, and the awareness of the suffering of a group of people is diminished or even erased.

It may seem innocent to leave that part out, but it does far more damage to omit key pieces of cultural erasure than to not have anything at all. Furthermore, below the whitewashed history on the boards are showcases full of rocks and other primitive items. The Museum is perpetuating what Roland Barthes referred to as the “effect of reality,” by normalizing the association of primitive objects to Native Americans through its uncritical narrative that seems to describe “concrete reality.”4 30 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

This is the same scenario with the “Global Treasures” display case also in Crossroads, which presumably is meant to represent all Latino cultures in Chicago with a handful of artifacts. The items chosen are not showcased properly, leaving the viewer to see the items out of context.

An example are the two Día De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) artifacts. It is a very important holiday to Mexican culture given that it represents everyone past, current, and future because it celebrates mankind’s mortality. The holiday is a joyous occasion and is festive and lively, not dark and scary. And it is certainly not as insignificant as the representation would suggest. Something of that level of importance should not share a tiny display box with disconnected items meant to “represent” other cultures.

[Editor’s note: Since the students’ visit, the Global Treasures case was deinstalled in fall 2022. As part of the Broadening Narratives work at the Chicago History Museum, visitors may see signage and other changes in Crossroads indicating the evaluative work taking place.]

The one-sided narrative can also be seen in the Museum’s general use of material culture. The idea of material culture is that objects found from other cultures could assist European and Western scholars in assessing

Above: in fall 2022, the artifacts were removed from the “Global Treasures” case in Crossroads, where the label describes Chicago as a global crossroads but without providing cultural context. Below: from the Lincoln alcoves, Abraham Lincoln’s watch is displayed beside shackles.

the stage of evolution of a specific group of people by comparing them to their own cultures. These scholars formed ideas of a people’s intelligence and abilities by judging objects against objects found in their own culture, a form of othering them. This resulted in different lifestyles being considered old-fashioned, outdated, and primitive. In the Chicago History Museum, this analysis of material culture is seen in objects ranging from weapons to pins, coins, leatherware, silverware, and clothing, but many of these items were in exhibitions with very broad captions that provided no cultural context to reduce the othering effect.

Another problematic object is the sombrero ashtray on display in the A Century of Progress fair display. What does it share about the culture it supposedly represents?

Meanwhile, if you look nearby and across the room, you’ll see an abundance of artifacts representing white European cultures that are more meaningful. Not only is there much more representation, but the items used are clearly more demonstrative. When the viewer peers into the Abraham Lincoln exhibition displays, they see a beautiful watch given to him as a reward for helping African Americans during slavery, but when you look Using Objects to Share Experiences | 31

directly next to it you see shackles. The mind naturally draws a comparison, but the viewer didn’t need shackles to understand the story. Perhaps it could be replaced by, or also include, an excerpt of something more personal to any of the enslaved African Americans Lincoln’s actions helped. Or any of the African Americans who undoubtedly assisted him during that time. By including the shackles, it places focus on the repression of culture and fits them into the dominate narrative as “other.”

Another interesting comparison is to the section devoted to Al Capone, who gained fame for being a criminal who harmed the neighborhoods of Chicago. He is most notably known for gang violence, prostitution rings, drug dealings, and other illegal actions. Why would a history museum give someone like that more space than a third of the population of our city? If Capone is important enough to stay, then it seems justified to give Chicago Latino cultures more real estate.

In order to nuance the Latino experience in Chicago, one could highlight different neighborhoods that have a high population density of Latinos. By not highlighting their perspectives, one creates silent violence, as the erasure of history creates negative effects. The epistemologies reflected in the Museum’s narratives can determine the way visitors perceive themselves within their community. Ultimately there is not a singular way to authenticate these Latino experiences, but one can certainly

elevate and amplify Latino/a/x communities by using objects that are representative of their experiences rather than stereotypes.

As an example, the Little Village neighborhood is full of rich culture that can be immersive and stay within the Museum’s approach. Dulcelandia del Sol could be featured within the exhibition Chicago: Crossroads of America; their store can positively nuance the Latino experience, as many growing up have visited Dulcelandia, whether to buy a piñata or simply browse around.

Furthermore, the infamous Super Mall in Little Village and some of their vendors can also nuance the Latino experience, as growing up in the area one ends up purchasing multiple items there. In terms of objects, featuring items such as religious votives, inflatable balloons, or even documented experiences like a simple haircut can alter the way the Chicago History Museum can nuance the Latino experience in Chicago.

Having quotes or even oral histories from construction workers could set the tone for understanding of how important Latino/a/x communities are to the city, as would interviewing people like social workers, first responders, and teachers. Some artifacts that should be displayed and would add serious value to understanding the city’s immense Latino culture would be objects that express how Mexican Independence Day has turned into a Chicago phenomenon. The streets are painted green

This photograph from the Museum’s Sun-Times collection shows participants and the crowd at the Mexican Independence Day parade on September 15, 1979.

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Street vendors have long been part of Chicago’s Latino culture. Here, a mother and children enjoy raspados from a vendor on the sidewalk on the northwest side of Chicago in the 1950s.

and red as thousands of Mexicans decorate their vehicles and drive around the city with pride. The Mexican flag has tied itself to the city of Chicago due to the large population that lives in the city.

Other items that should be displayed to represent Latino culture and enhance the Latino experience are artifacts that would reflect the vendors who are found at many corners of the city, such as eloteros and tamaleros, or even common bodegas. These have all become a symbol of Latino culture, and it’s a small but very impactful part of the city. Having something like a cart or a big umbrella that is recognizable from blocks away would let visitors comprehend that Latino culture can be found in all places throughout the city.

Ultimately, it is a rigorous task to fully and equally amplify and give a platform to all the differing groups that compose Chicago, but it is a necessary task in order to provide an accurate representation of the city as a whole. Museums are tools, and therefore narratives that are being produced should not be censored. The danger of a singular story and amplification of others through stereotypical, decontextualized objects, becomes dangerous as the story becomes a silencer of the forgotten.

Studies suggest that aside from family, the information we hold in the highest regard as true are museums.5 We are “othering” our friends and families by not respecting their heritage in such an important institution.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are taken by Chicago History Museum staff unless otherwise specified. 32, ST70006682-0079, Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum. 33, Chicago History Museum, ICHi093523; Stephen Deutch, photographer.

E N D N OT E S 1. See the 2020 census, in which 28.7% of Chicagoans reported their race as Hispanic or Latino. “Quick Facts: Chicago city, Illinois,” United States Census Bureau, 2020. https://www.census.gov/ quickfacts/chicagocityillinois 2. Carlos Ballesteros, “’We Deserve to Be Remembered’: High School Students Push Chicago History Museum to Better Represent Latinos,” Chicago Sun-Times, November 18, 2019. https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/11/18/20971138/chicagohistory-museum-latino-cps-students-instituto-justice-leadershipacademy 3. This is, however, brought to light in the online experience Democracy Limited: Chicago Women and the Vote.

4. The “effect of reality” is the idea that realistic descriptive narrative is merely a rhetorical device, and historical writing that describes an unproblematic realism is only signifying the concept of realism itself. See: Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, ed. Francois Wahl, trans. Richard Howard, 141–48 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

5. “Museums and Trust 2021,” American Alliance of Museums, September 30, 2021. https://www.aam-us.org/2021/09/30/ museums-and-trust-2021/ Using Objects to Share Experiences | 33

QUESTION 3:.

Based on your visit to the Museum, how do you think we can accomplish diversifying voices in the narrative about the history of Chicago and bring nuance to the histories of different peoples in the city without stereotyping groups or ignoring intersectionality?

Undoing the Silencing of Historical Narratives MELISSA CAMPOS, ALEXA FULGENCIO, LUCY HARMON, KIRA OBERMAN, JOSEPHINA OPSENICA, AND BRYNNE TOLENTINO

he history of Chicago is rich with many different voices and perspectives. History is filled with complexities and nuances, but that does not mean we should shy away from them.

Instead, we should give the average museumgoer more credit in understanding that the events of Chicago’s history cannot be collapsed into a single, straightforward narrative, and the effects these events had on Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities have been harmful. It is not an accurate historical narrative without these elements.

Donald Preziosi the American art historian describes museums as “similar to nostalgia . . . ambivalent places where the present constantly negotiates and reconfigures the past and the future.”1 Museums are places that navigate through narratives of past, present, and future, deciding what each of those narratives is and how it can be presented. They also explore where individuals can find their place in these narratives. Due to political movements and institutions of power influencing aesthetic and beauty standards within a society, museums often become the home for dominant narratives that come from those movements and institutions.

For the future of the Chicago History Museum, we hope diverse voices will speak through its new and existing exhibitions. These exhibitions should use information and collection materials to examine and discuss the histories of the many peoples of Chicago, without revictimizing or romanticizing their stories. In order to make the Museum’s narratives, particularly in exhibitions, contain diversity that reflects the city of Chicago, we have to look at how museums themselves function in society, the flaws that they are often guilty of, and how they can change the perception of a group of

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people through storytelling. The intention to tell the story of Chicago’s diversity is meaningless if people do not feel like they are being accurately and fairly represented, and ultimately Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) should also be given the opportunity to see themselves represented in the Museum’s exhibitions.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot the Haitian anthropologist states in his 1995 book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, “Any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly.”2 As museums work to tie the past, present, and future into a narrative to be shared with the viewer, truths and reality can become muddled.

Historical narratives are filled with silences, changes to the story are made either purposely or inadvertently that result in a loss of truth and an invention of new fact.

Championing diversity in a history museum must be accompanied by an acknowledgment of the silences that history has traditionally forced upon minorities. A museum should not take it upon themselves to fill these silences with romantic notions that hope to give visitors closure. These narratives also often strive to invoke an emotional reaction from the viewer, whether that is inspiration, rage, or empowerment, but a museum should not highlight the violence of these silences for the purpose of shocking visitor into empathy.

A comparison can be made here to monuments, which gain their authority through making the public feel proud and/or reflective of their history. However, while monuments represent a closure of narrative, museums have the opportunity to extend history’s life and leave it constantly open to new information. Knowing this, the Chicago History Museum should strive to keep the

narratives that they present fluid and continuously changing and avoid presenting historical stories that draw firm conclusions about the individuals or communities they represent, conclusions that hold the possibility of revictimization and/or misrepresentation.

Silencing in Facing Freedom in America One exhibition we can evaluate with these considerations is the Chicago History Museum’s Facing Freedom in America exhibition. Outside the exhibition, a wall label states: “America is a land of immigrants. . . . Citizens welcomed them as a pool of cheap labor, but their languages, customs, and cultural expressions clashed with existing American ideas, values, and behavior.”3 The exhibition then walks visitors through eight stories of how different groups of people fought for their freedom in a particular situation. There is information on what public protests are, how conflict ensues, workers’ rights, racial division, and citizenship. Some of the historical events shown include the fight for women’s suffrage, the 1963 Chicago Public Schools boycott, Japanese internment, the United Farm Workers grape boycott, and the 1973 takeover of the Wounded Knee reservation.4 These stories highlight dark significant events that happened to specific groups of people. In using these events, there is a risk of them becoming an epistemicide, or a silencing, of the rest of the cultures’ histories. One way to counter this silencing might be to include more

This text is displayed on the first floor of the Museum outside of the Facing Freedom in America exhibition.

The United Farm Workers display in the Facing Freedom in America exhibition at the Chicago History Museum.

personal narratives from the actual people who were oppressed. Facing Freedom centers mass violations of human rights these groups endured, rather than their direct experiences or the ways these violations affected their cultural experiences more widely, or how these struggles have had lasting repercussions that still negatively affect marginalized communities in our current times.

In addition, to ensure this exhibition remains intersectional and nuanced, the Museum must emphasize that one group's experience of freedom is often enjoyed at the cost of the oppression of another group. This is touched on through the explanation of racial discrimination and isolation throughout the fight for women’s right to vote, but it should be continued through the other stories presented. Furthermore, as one continues throughout the Museum, these themes are not reconsidered. There is no mention of how Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country5 despite being so culturally diverse, nor any mention of redlining and other racial segregation tools, which were invented and practiced in Chicago since the early twentieth century. These injustices still negatively affect people on the South and West Sides of the city. And while there is an Indigenous section in Chicago: Crossroads of America, there were artifacts but very little narrative about peoples’ experiences within Chicago and why the history of the Indigenous peoples of Chicago is as important as Chicago itself. Crossroads almost made Indigenous people more of a spectacle to look at rather than a moment to educate and understand what it really means to be Indigenous in Chicago.

Undoing the Silencing | 35

The Marshall Field & Company display in Crossroads is part of the Second to None section, highlighting innovations that originated in Chicago, such as the modern department store.

Silencing in Chicago: Crossroads of America Specifically when looking at the history of Chicago in the Chicago: Crossroads of America exhibition, there is very much the presence of the “other” within the exhibition.

Even the layout of the space seems to push content on people of color and their accomplishments to the outskirts of the exhibition itself. There is also a very clear theme that the exhibition is about the material things and accomplishments of Chicago and not the people of Chicago. For example, the exhibition is centered on the L car, but it doesn’t portray the struggle of those who work on the train itself, and other struggles, such as forced displacement, that came with the accomplishment of building transportation routes in the city.6 While it is an impossible task to incorporate everything that Chicago is and has been into one exhibition, the majority of Chicago’s communities are not represented at all, while there is room for a Marshall Field’s store window. There are many displays about the economic 36 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

and industrial histories of the city. And while industry and the economy are not unimportant, there aren’t narratives about the working-class people who got their hands dirty to build the city. Much of the information is focused on the institutions and bigger (i.e., richer) players. These choices call into question whether the exhibition is more focused on consumerism and technology than the people who truly make the city what it is.

A portion of the exhibition is dedicated to invention and the history of it in Chicago. One featured story is of the research of the first birth control pill to be FDA approved, which was funded by a Chicago resident. However, what is omitted from the story is that some of the testing had been conducted on women in Puerto Rico without their consent. Omitting this information is an example of the way silence is perpetuated in narratives. The story in the exhibition of the pill’s invention was one filled with romantic ideas of scientific ingenuity and bodily autonomy for women, completely disregarding the exploitative practices that went into the research.7

Another innovation with a Chicago connection, the Pill display in Crossroads mentions that clinical trials were conducted in Puerto Rico due to its lack of anti-birth control laws but does not address ethical issues in conducting those trials.

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Dress display at My Quince World, a quinceañera and bridal boutique located in the Little Village community area at 3619 W. Twenty-Sixth Street, where oral histories have been collected as part of the Aquí en Chicago project.

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Give Communities a Voice The history of Chicago is not its economic accomplishments, but its people and communities. Thus, one way to diversify the voices in a narrative that truthfully represents the history of Chicago is to go to the communities themselves. The Museum could begin with encouraging and advocating for the direct involvement of Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native, and other marginalized communities who have a long historical presence in Chicago.

Presenting who and what the community is and the significance behind their accomplishments can already begin to diversify the narrative by adding on to the context behind particular objects or incidents that they choose to present. This would also avoid treating underrepresented groups and their specific struggles as a spectacle for onlookers, but to represent and reflect the communities that make up Chicago.

Creating more space for personal narratives from the people the exhibitions are representing can also be a powerful tool in showcasing these subtleties and diversities in Chicago’s history. The knowledge and understanding that a family’s narrative can provide is much greater than artifacts and images and words written by someone who wasn’t there. Giving people authority and power over the representation of their history within these spaces so that they may tell their side of it— although this may include only a few points of view—is how stereotyping may be avoided and a more nuanced portrayal of history achieved. It would also establish a feeling for visitors of seeing themselves in history. The crux of this lies in developing relationships and establishing ties with these communities, such as with local families, along with allocating more space for culturally important artifacts.

In addition to this, acknowledging the connections and relationships between these communities is also important for the purpose of highlighting the interconnectedness that exists in a city’s history. There is only so much that can be said within a single display or exhibition, so showing the ways that these communities have supported, interacted, and overlapped with each throughout historical events, movements, and even in everyday life is important, while simultaneously giving these communities their own space. This means going beyond the “global community” label, because while this says that there are people from many different places that have lived and are living in Chicago, it does not do the complex and intertwined histories of each culture justice. Rather than showcasing the diverse communities of Chicago for the sake of showing that they exist, thinking about what this exhibition or display does to benefit said communities in the present is important to consider too. Adopting a framework that is

more than just multicultural, which only looks at these communities at an individual level and not as a working whole, would be an appropriate approach so as not ignore intersectionality but instead foster it throughout all displays.

It is also important to do away with the image of who the “ideal” museumgoer is—to not assume that every visitor is there for one particular reason, but rather keep in mind that the visitors will come to the exhibition from different places and backgrounds, seeking different things. By avoiding filling the silences in the histories left upon the minorities in Chicago with unsuitable or stereotypical narratives, one can do away with the inappropriate assumptions they have about their ideal visitor and take steps toward creating a more diverse museum experience. Additionally, exhibitions about the oppression of different groups of people should address how these issues contribute to the continued oppression of people today. These adjustments could have the potential to not only better educate visitors, but also push them to think critically about what they can do with the information they are receiving.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are taken by Chicago History Museum staff unless otherwise specified.

E N D N OT E S 1. Donald Preziosi, “The Problematics of Collecting and Display,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 77 (Mar. 1995): 6–23.

2. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

3. Chicago History Museum, Facing Freedom in America, 2010. www.chicagohistory.org/exhibition/facing-freedom-in-america/.

4. Ibid.

5. See, e.g., Jacqueline Serrato, Pat Sier, and Charmaine Runes, “Mapping Chicago’s Racial Segregation,” South Side Weekly. https://interactive.wttw.com/firsthand/segregation/mappingchicago-racial-segregation 6. See, e.g., “Displaced: When the Eisenhower Expressway Moved in, Who Was Forced Out?,” WBEZ interactive, https://interactive.wbez.org/curiouscity/eisenhower/ 7. See, e.g., Ray Quintanilla, “Puerto Ricans Recall Being Guinea Pigs for ‘Magic Pill,’” Chicago Tribune, April 11, 2004. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2004-04-110404110509-story.html; Jonathan Eig, The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); Theresa Vargas, “Guinea Pigs or Pioneers? How Puerto Rican Women Were Used to Test the Birth Control Pill,” Washington Post, May 9, 2017. www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/09/guinea-pigs-orpioneers-how-puerto-rican-women-were-used-to-test-thebirth-control-pill/.

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QUESTION 4:.

Often, issues of authenticity emerge when you visit the Museum, based on your visit, how can the new Aquí en Chicago exhibition approach the issue of authenticity? What can be avoided and how?

Addressing Authenticity in the Chicago History Museum SIOBHAN BROUCEK, JESSICA CHERCO, TONY ZAPATA FERNANDEZ, COLLIN LOGSDON, AND XIMENA RAMIREZ

hat is authenticity and why is it important when we walk through a museum?

It seems that people need to know or see that something is authentic to care about it, especially in a museum. In a history museum, authenticity involves being true to a culture when representing an original idea or custom from that culture. Authenticity relies on the context and association it has with a particular culture. Currently, the Chicago History Museum struggles with showing authenticity especially in their Latino/a/x representation. This is harmful to the Latinx community in Chicago because it is an erasure of multiple cultures that represent such a large part of the city.

Being known as one of the most diverse cities in the United States and with a current population of nearly three million residents, Chicago’s neighborhoods and the ethnic backgrounds of its residents make up the city’s past, present, and future. As museums work to create experiences for their audience, they should consider what authenticity means to them as an institution and how that value should be upheld in the work they do. Exhibitions attract the attention of their audiences by being of authentic value, and new exhibitions provide an opportunity to display the authenticity of cultural diversity in Chicago.

As professor of anthropology Richard Handler states, “authenticity replaces sincerity as a central element in the individualistic worldview”1 that structures our world.

As the Chicago History Museum works toward rethinking its permanent Chicago: Crossroads of America exhibition through the Broadening Narratives initiative and opening its Aquí en Chicago exhibition in 2025, curators of both projects must consider who and what they are authenticating for and how best to present a historical account of the minoritization, racialization, and identification of dif-

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ferent cultures within Chicago. However, we do not have to give up sincerity as a value. The visitor’s emotional attachment will be sincere if the material being represented is what they individually define as a real experience in their culture, but again, who is defining what is sincere and what is not for inclusion?

Presenting history as unilineal2 creates a false narrative of cultures not working alongside one another for configuration of and growth in society, all the while, as Handler states, “national or ethnic groups find themselves in a struggle for recognition.”3 Each group acts to possess their history and should work toward broadening their outreach, while moving away from defining nationalities as one distinct culture that can be represented by one thought or one object. Culture can change street-by-street, county-by-county, or state-bystate, yet individuals may still consider themselves part of the same broader group.

The upcoming Aquí en Chicago exhibition should tell the audience a dynamic, plurarlistic narrative of cultural history in Chicago, while maintaining a cohesive collective identity rather than othering groups by isolating them in separate displays. By separating cultures as individual stories and values, we ignore the reality of bondage to one another in society and our nonunilineal identification. Objects in the Museum should work toward this sense of broadening group identification, which will then provide a more “authentic” experience for the audience. Social outreach and extending a hand from an institution that was once considered to be for the elite and in which one culture is valued more than other cultures is one step. A further step for the Chicago History Museum is to dismantle the processes of othering cultures in the displays of the new exhibition.

Avoid Stereotypes What we show in a museum will be imprinted on people’s memories. If we show stereotypical art and exhibitions, then that becomes the culture in question’s reality to others looking for authentic information.

Showing very little of Latino culture at the Chicago History Museum will influence the public into thinking that culture has little to no history or influence in Chicago, when that is not true; there is a large Latino/a/x community all around Chicago. By showing stereotypes, such as the lowrider car4 that sparked a student protest—a stereotype that came from California, one paints the picture that Latino/a/x people hardly contributed to being a part of Chicago. The Museum is a reputable institution for information on Chicago’s cultural history, and that can harm underrepresented cultures and make these stereotypes become true in the public’s eyes.

Lumping several cultures together and not giving them the respect they need in their own spaces to share important stories is an act of othering. This can be seen in the “Global Treasures” case, which puts Mexican artifacts in the same small glass case as Asian Indian and Vietnamese artifacts. [Editor’s note: Since the students’ visit, the Global

Treasures case was deinstalled in fall 2022. As part of the Broadening Narratives work at the Chicago History Museum, visitors may see signage and other changes in Crossroads indicating the evaluative work taking place.] If this is someone’s first impression of one of those cultures and that cultural history, then the Chicago History Museum needs to be careful with what they display, as this impacts the visitor’s understanding of the truth.

People look to museums for factual information, but if the Museum only displays items that represent a stereotype in Mexican culture, then it can be interpreted as making fun of them and identifying them as the other. This is how stereotypes stay alive and spread.

We should be able to respect and give each culture their own light and voice and not focus on cultures as the “other,” because in a shared reality there is no such thing. Stereotypes are harmful to educating the public, not factual, and only meant to poke fun at one another. People are more than dismissive stereotypes.

Provide Context

The sombrero ashtray souvenir from the A Century of Progress world’s fair (above) and the since-removed objects in the “Global Treasures” case in Crossroads (below) from Mexican, Asian Indian, and Vietnamese Chicagoans.

In addition to promoting stereotypes, the few artifacts in Chicago: Crossroads of America meant to represent Mexican cultures seem like last ditch efforts to add something Mexican to the exhibit. For example, there is a sombrero ashtray souvenir on display, which has a simple label: “Sombrero ash tray souvenir.”5 This artifact is next to a photo of ten people standing in traditional Mexican clothing, and the label reads: “Participants from the Mexican Village on opening day, 1934.”6 This part of the exhibition is dedicated to the A Century of Progress world’s fair, and it invites questions: Who are these people? And why was there a Mexican Village at the world’s fair? Was it meant to be an authentic representation of and by Mexican people?

The only other representation of Latino culture in Crossroads are the small Day of the Dead figures in the “Global Treasures” section. The figures are grouped with random assortments such as: “Vietnamese instruments” or “Asian Indian ankle bells.” There is no context or description under the objects, and the exhibition provides no reason as to why they are grouped together.

Once again, these leave the visitor with more questions about the context of these objects, more specifically, why are they considered “global treasures”?

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Above: participants from the Mexican Village on opening day at the A Century of Progress International Exposition in 1934. Below: the Chicago Bulls’ jersey and shoes on display in Crossroads.

The Aquí en Chicago exhibition and the reimagined Crossroads exhibition must make a radical pivot from the current narratives presented in the Museum’s exhibitions. There needs to be a sense of inclusion for every culture that is in Chicago, especially the Latinx population that makes a third of the city, which is the focus of the Aquí exhibition. The current Crossroads exhibition has few depictions of Latinx people; yet it is clear time was spent on other sections, such as baseball, the Bulls, and commercial products made in Chicago. The information and details on industry and capital is immense.

Context is key when addressing the issues of authenticity. The context that surrounds an object or photograph should display to museum visitors a cultural narrative. An exhibition should not have visitors confused as to why the objects are included. There must be clear depictions and descriptions explaining the object’s significance and relationship to Chicago. Simply displaying a “sombrero ashtray souvenir” with no description cannot be justified as a proper representation of culture. The contributions and traditions that are celebrated in the Latinx community and that shape Chicago should be shown rather than dismissed.

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The students from Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy (Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy) with their posters made to protest the Chicago History Museum’s lack of Latinx history.

Authenticity Has Its Limits Authenticity can be dangerous, especially when the objects in question are considered violent or hurtful.

Though there is some value for items on display to be “real” and coming from the actual place that they are presenting information about, this does not have to be the focus for every single object or piece of art. Just because the item or piece can be traced back to its origins, this does not automatically mean the exhibition is worth more.

Many museums value authenticity. An idea behind this is that visitors enjoy seeing the “real.” An example of this in the Crossroads of America exhibition occurs where there are items like jerseys and shoes worn by past NBA players. The focus of this part of the exhibition is the authenticity of the shoes or the jerseys, but this can take away from the main reason why they are there. If one goes to a museum to learn about history, they could easily be distracted from learning about the city’s history by these “authentic” items that come from famous people and that elevate individuals with a lot of wealth.

The word “authenticity” is often misused to the point where its deeper meaning is diminishing. People usually believe something is authentic because they are told to think it is. Instead, they need to experience that authenticity straight from the source. Most museum exhibitions don’t state where and how exactly they received the objects that they are displaying. So, in the Aquí en Chicago exhibition, one way to preserve not only the voices of the people in Latino/a/x communities, but to preserve the overall mission of this exhibition, is to give credit where credit is due regardless of the shape this takes. Even if the authentic posters used by the students of Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy to protest the Museum’s Crossroads exhibition, aren’t included, that really isn’t the priority.

What matters is that the mission was accomplished; those students made a difference and are making the Museum

reevaluate their exhibitions. They created change. As long as their story is told, that’s what is important; regardless of whether the “authentic” posters are included in the new exhibition, not having them won’t diminish their mission.

The students of Rudy Lozano Leadership Academy especially deserve to be credited for kickstarting a movement.

Their passion and determination will have the people of Chicago, and beyond, become educated on how a previously overlooked third of the city’s population is an essential part of its history.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are taken by Chicago History Museum staff unless otherwise specified. 42, Chicago History Museum, ICHi-040306; O. L. Cook, photographer. 43, courtesy of and photograph by Anton Miglietta, Teacher, Instituto Justice Leadership Academy Rudy Lozano Campus.

E N D N OT E S 1. Richard Handler. “Authenticity.” Anthropology Today 2, no. 1 (1986): 2–4. https://doi.org/10.2307/3032899.

2. Unilineal history is the idea that human society has moved from a primitive state to its most civilized state found specifically in Western culture. For more information on material culture and their role in the reinforcement of unilineal history, see: Victor Buchli, The Material Culture Reader (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002).

3. Richard, Handler. “Authenticity.” Anthropology Today 2, no. 1 (1986): 2–4. https://doi.org/10.2307/3032899.

4. Though the lowrider has been removed from the lobby, photographs can be found at Nathan Clardy, “Chicago History Museum,” September 15, 2014. https://nathanclardy. wordpress.com/2014/09/15/chicago-history-museum/ 5. Chicago History Museum, Chicago: Crossroads of America, 2006.

6. Ibid.

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QUESTION 5:.

What are the ways in which the Museum could engage with the needs, values, and histories of a broader collective of visitors beyond adjusting the objects on display? (Thank you to Auden Granger for this question.)

Going Beyond the Objects AGHADADASH BALAGADASHOV, SHENFAN FENG, ADRIANA GASGONIA, AUDEN GRANGER, JENDAYI INGRAM, ROMY MACASAET IV, MERLIN RYAN, AND MINGZHENG ZHANG

On the first floor of the Museum, a wall display contains photographs of immigrant families in Chicago, but their stories are not told within a larger narrative of collective history.

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he poet Audre Lorde writes, “We do not live single-issue lives.”1 This is the first principle of the disability justice movement. Over the course of the semester, our class has confronted the history of museums as Wunderkammer,2 or a collection of objects from disparate places and cultures brought together as the sole representations of the people they were taken from. We grappled with the ways in which museums decontextualize and recontextualize objects as pieces of a particular narrative.

In the past, museums used unilineal narratives, which relied on an idea that all societies are contributing to a single track of human progress.

While the narrative found in the Chicago History Museum is far from the unilinealism of these museum forerunners,3 it continues to categorize and separate facets of Chicago history by identity group. The new Chicago History Museum vision is to “be one of the most trusted and inclusive cultural institutions of our collective history.”4 But “inclusion” within a flawed and limited structure is not enough. While the intention of including a broader array of identities and experiences in the display cases of the Museum is an admirable one, simply adding more objects to the Museum’s collection to represent a broader population of people does not address larger, more significant questions: Who is given the authority to decide what kinds of people our “collective history” includes, and why? Why does the museum—any museum—have such an extraordinary power to shape the narratives of Chicago’s history and, in doing so, its present?

While there many identity groups that are not represented in the Chicago History Museum—including, for example, South Asian Chicagoans and disabled Chicagoans—creating a set of displays that separate out identity groups creates an illusion of a city built on single-issue lives and single-issue movements. It reifies the precise categorizations of people that then generate the category of “the other.” In our class, we spoke about how “othering” is a verb, not a noun; there is no category of “the other” without the active process of drawing divisions. It is not until we engage with the intersections that we will accurately represent our collective history, and that can only happen by challenging the idea that any object can represent a culture, a marginalized group, a story. We must move beyond the display case.

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Today, signs such as these can be found in Crossroads as the Museum works on deinstalling and evaluating items from its collections.

Use Authentic Frameworks Museums were created to collect, preserve, and interpret artifacts about historical events that were considered important or essential. And these pieces of material cultural are often what draw visitors to a museum. But historical narratives have different cultural elements beyond the material, and it is the responsibility of museums to unite these various elements in an exhibition. The way a museum presents history is through a perspective and a set of values. Museums often use a single perspective to frame their exhibitions, which makes them less inclusive, especially in a metropolitan area like Chicago, where people from many different backgrounds intersect.

Having a singular narrative can make a museum appear inauthentic in its telling of history.

To be a reliable resource for history, a museum must first ensure the authenticity of its collections. While this includes not presenting intentionally deceptive objects, accurate descriptions of the collections are also necessary.

That is, it is an essential responsibility of a museum to describe accurately the origins and context of their collections. This includes both the way a culture, people, or event is represented and the ways artifacts were obtained.

Even though some artifacts are donated to museums, it is important that their owners or representatives of their owners are okay with them being in a museum. There have been numerous cases where people from the artifacts’ culture would prefer them to either go to the families they belong to or a museum in their hometown or home country.5 [Editor’s note: The Chicago History Museum has been engaged in the work of deinstalling and/or evaluating items from its collections, including artifacts in its collection from Indigenous groups.]

One way a museum could ensure accurate representation of its objects would be to allow community members from an object’s culture of origin to collaborate on the curation of the knowledge. For example, if a piece of Mexican jewelry is put on display, it could include a video Beyond the Objects | 45

showing how the jewelry is made or even have a person come in and demonstrate how it is made. Allowing for community collaboration on the curation not only lets that community have some control over what is shared in the museum, but it could also make them feel heard or appreciated. This type of community inclusion could also extend to who is employed at a museum, including experts with deep knowledge and personal experiences that go beyond the Western Euro-centric one.

Include the Bad Although artifacts can tell us a major part of history, it is difficult to get the full story. That is, we only get the side of the story that the museum presents to us. This also means that many stories are not told. In ancient times, for example, the story of royalty was always recorded in detail and passed down through generations, but not the rough life of the town peddler. There are many such forgotten histories, but if we do not consider the historical value of these people at the “bottom” of society and their social contributions, can we really know a place’s history? So, for museums, preserving forgotten objects and telling neglected histories is included in the purpose of museums, even if the histories are not positive.

The Chicago History Museum tells stories from the Great Chicago Fire and the World’s Columbian Exposition to political moments from impactful figures and what the famous “L” train used to look like. All of these things are part of Chicago’s history, but these are merely the aspects of their history that the Museum chose to represent through its objects. There is nothing in the Museum, for example, that talks about the “human zoos”6 that showed a superficial culture made up by curators to entertain the masses, consequently creating stereotypes that exist in today’s world. There was no mention of the people of color who were segregated and could only attend the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition on one given day. There is also no mention of the redlining that the Federal Housing Administration participated in. There is no display that showed how they refused to back loans explicitly to Black people, even to those who lived in communities that were predominantly Black. All this racism, immorality, and dehumanization is part of Chicago’s history, yet there is nothing in the Museum that shows this.

The misrepresentation and lack of representation of many of Chicago’s people does not really “connect people to Chicago’s history and each other,” as the Chicago History Museum strives to do as part of its mission.7 It is an injustice to only show what life was like for one dominant culture. Without acknowledging the bad, we cannot better ourselves as a whole. One way the Museum could move toward that goal would be to reach out to outside sources who have either had personal experience with 46 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

“The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature” by Ida B. Wells, published in Chicago and distributed by Wells at the 1893 fair.

Chicago’s more negative history or conduct more research on the less represented history of Chicago, and then add exhibitions to properly represent the needs and values of people affected by that side of history.

Add Experiences and Workshops Ideally, a museum should be at the forefront for information about culture and identity. The public’s perception of museums has evolved, and the dynamic between museum visitors and their experiences has evolved along with the times. In Stephen Weil’s article “The Museums and the Public” more than 25 years ago, he predicted that in the first half of the twenty-first century, “the relationship between museums and the public will undergo a 180-degree shift, when the public will dominate, not the museum.”8 Because the Chicago History Museum is built off the strength of a metropolitan city, it is imperative to not only include history about Chicago and the landmarks of the city. But to also give space and highlight the people who live in the city. The city of Chicago embodies many different peoples and cultures across the area. Many

In partnership with 18th Street Casa de Cultura, CHM curator of civic engagement and social justice Elena Gonzales and director of collections Julie Wroblewski hosted a bilingual chat in early 2023 to share the best ways to store and care for family history items.

Beyond the Objects | 47

Students observed that the natural lighting in the Lincoln’s Chicago and Abraham Lincoln exhibitions on the second floor of the Museum affects the visitor’s experience with those exhibitions.

movements were started in Chicago by writers, activists, and artists. What makes Chicago unique is the sense of community that is emphasized here. Highlighting and gathering people and their communities would be a great way for the Museum to engage with the needs, values, and histories of a broader collective of visitors beyond adjusting the objects on display.

Events such as workshops, in- and outside of the Museum could give visitors a better understanding of Chicago’s history. Having people from different communities lead these workshops or collaborating with the Museum to put on these events is also important to reflect the community that’s being discussed. In addition to workshops, other activities could be tied to specific exhibitions, such as using art or music, as another way to share a different history and culture beyond objects.

Likewise, guided tours with experienced guides and history exchanges may also help visitors understand the meaning of an exhibition beyond its objects.

Accommodate a Variety of Visitors There are many types of museum visitors, and there are times when these different types and their respective needs clash. Some people expect to see the familiar and others expect novelty and the latest acquisitions to the 48 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

museum’s collection. Therefore, the balance between fresh ideas and established ones is an essential indicator of how popular a museum will be. Based on a study of visitors to one art museum,9 we found that some visitors drove from the city’s outskirts to see a particular painting, others came explicitly for the novelty of an event, and students came to complete their homework.

Whenever a significant event was held, the number of novelty-seeking visitors increased dramatically, but according to the study, most chose not to return. If we apply this to museums more generally, then it seems important that they must accommodate different visitor groups.

Another way groups specifically visiting the Chicago History Museum differ is in their familiarity of Chicago.

Some visitors may be new to Chicago, and they may only take away a fragmented understanding of the city from the Museum’s current Chicago: Crossroads of America exhibition. A systematic overview or section of an exhibition that follows the sequence of historical events and a detailed introductory text could help tourists who are brand new to the city. Likewise, people from Chicago may look at historical objects and compare them to current Chicago—so connecting the past to current events may make visitors feel more involved.

In terms of how text and objects are displayed, the Museum’s labels use a variety of formats and rich colors, which add visual interest. Exhibitions also use video to provide more information about certain topics. However, the variety of lighting from exhibition to exhibition changes the experience. Crossroads is dimly lit, and the color scheme is browns and blacks, which has a different ambiance from the Lincoln’s Chicago exhibition around the corner, which is naturally lit. This makes it easy to read the information about Lincoln, while it is difficult in Crossroads, making the information less accessible, particularly to visitors with low vision.

The Chicago History Museum must take into account the needs of all types of visitors and pay attention to the many aspects of displaying its collections and writing history in order to meet the needs of different types of people.

Consider Location Giving space for everyone is important and access is a very significant need. Whether that’s the people who work there or visitors to the Museum. The Chicago History Museum has not historically been accessible to the city’s many cultures, and one reason for this may be because people don’t see themselves in the Museum.

Furthermore, for its entire post-Fire history, the Museum has been situated on the North Side of Chicago in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, which is currently not a diverse neighborhood and home predominantly to affluent white people.10 Easy access will increase the number of visitors to the Museum. According to Google Maps’ “busy areas” feature,11 we discovered that the farther a museum is from Chicago’s downtown, the less crowded it is. Compared to the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture, which is farther from downtown, the Art Institute of Chicago, which is close to downtown, is always crowded. People choose closer locations when the cost of travel rises. Market researchers also have a detailed description of this phenomenon, the “decay with distance” effect.12 The location of the Chicago History Museum is relatively accessible via public transport, but to expand community involvement and go beyond the objects, it is necessary to step outside of the physical space and engage with the people surrounding the Museum.

In sum, the public is made up of distinctive individuals with different orientations, cultures, perspectives, and group memberships. By doing things like expanding its narrative framework, including negative history, strengthening community outreach, actively organizing events, expanding accessibility, and building traffic around the Museum, the Chicago History Museum can gain a larger pool of visitors without changing the objects on display.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are taken by Chicago History Museum staff unless otherwise specified. 46, Chicago History Museum, ICHi-040939.

E N D N OT E S 1. Audre Lourde, “Learning from the 60s.” www.blackpast.org/ african-american-history/1982-audre-lorde-learning-60s/.

2. See “Wunderkammer,” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms.

3. For more information on material culture and their role in the reinforcement of unilineal history, see: Victor Buchli, The Material Culture Reader (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002).

4. Chicago History Museum, “Vision Statement,” shared by Elena Gonzales during her class visit.

5. For more on repatriation in museums, see, e.g., Neil G. W. Curtis, “Universal Museums, Museum Objects and Repatriation: The Tangled Stories of Things,” Museum Management and Curatorship 21, no. 2 (2006): 117–27; Robin Scher, “Better Safe Than Sorry: American Museums Take Measures Mindful of Repatriation of African Art,” ARTnews, January 11, 2019. www.artnews.com/ artnews/news/african-art-repatriation-american-museums-12750/; Geraldine Kendall Adams, “A New Approach to Repatriation: The Two Museums That are Nurturing Relationships with Communities of Origin,” Museums Association, November 2, 2020. https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/ features/2020/11/a-new-approach-to-repatriation/# 6. Blanchard Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boetsch, Éric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire, and Charles Forsdick, Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008).

7. “About Us,” Chicago History Museum. http://www.chicagohistory.org/about-us/.

8. Stephen E. Weil, “The Museum and the Public,” Museum Management and Curatorship 16, no. 3 (1997): 257–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647779708565852.

9. Katherine N. Cotter, Anna Fekete, and Paul J. Silvia, “Why Do People Visit Art Museums? Examining Visitor Motivations and Visitor Outcomes,” Emperical Studies of the Arts 40, no. 2 (2022): 275–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/02762374211011740.

10. “Community Data Snapshot – Lincoln Park,” cmap.illinois.gov, MetroPulse. https://www.cmap.illinois.gov/documents/ 10180/126764/Lincoln+Park.pdf.

11. See Google Maps, https://www.google.com/maps 12. See, e.g., Bob McKercher and Alan A. Lew, “Distance Decay and the Impact of Effective Tourism Exclusion Zones on International Travel Flows,” Journal of Travel Research 42, no. 2 (2003): 159–65.

Beyond the Objects | 49

M A K I N G H I S T O RY I

The William Blair Effect: Interviews with Michelle Collins and John Ettelson T I M OT H Y J . G I L F OY L E

ohn Ettelson began working at William Blair & Company, a leading Chicago investment bank, as a banking associate in 1984. He rose through the ranks within the firm, eventually serving as chief executive officer from 2004 to 2022. During his tutelage, Ettelson oversaw the expansion of William Blair’s investment banking, private wealth, and asset management businesses to include more than 20 offices globally and a sevenfold increase in annual revenue to approximately $2.3 billion.1 Michelle Collins also began her professional career in Chicago at William Blair, distinguishing herself not only in finance, but in her civic work, in which she was identified for her “willingness to take leadership positions on issues impacting women’s lives and racial justice.” In 2004, she was named one of the 100 Most Influential Women in Chicago by Crain’s Chicago Business.2 John R. Ettelson was born and raised in the Lincoln Park neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago. “I was actually born at 1366 Dearborn Street and then lived at 2350 [Dearborn] for a while,” Ettelson recounts. “I finally spent most of my childhood at 2440 Lakeview, just north of Fullerton.”3 He was born in September 1958 to Susan Stern Ettelson and Jerome Ettelson, the descendants of East European and German Jewish immigrants, who arrived in Chicago during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both Susan Stern and Jerome Ettelson grew up in Chicago and attended the Francis W. Parker School and Senn High School, respectively. When it came time to choose a school, Ettelson’s parents elected to enroll him in his mother’s alma mater, Francis Parker, which he attended from 1962 to 1976.4 Michelle L. Collins was born in March 1960 in the South Side of Chicago to Elizabeth “Ann” Terry Collins and Rosecrain Collins Jr.5 “My dad was the oldest of the nine kids,” explains Collins.6 After the death of his father, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, with his mother.

There, he eventually earned his col-

J

50 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

Michelle Collins (left) was awarded the Bertha Honoré Palmer Making History Award for Distinction in Civic Leadership in 2023. John Ettelson (right) was awarded the Bertha Honoré Palmer Making History Award for Distinction in Civic Leadership in 2022.

lege degree from Tennessee State, which “he paid for himself with lots of odd jobs,” according to Collins. After receiving a degree in dentistry from the Meharry Medical College School of Dentistry and marrying Elizabeth Ann Terry in 1959 while she was a student at Fisk University, they moved to Chicago. “That’s the Great Migration story,” explains Collins. “He had come to Chicago a couple times before, so he thought that if he was going to be a dentist he needed to get to a bigger city. He had imagined he’d be on his own.” In retrospect, Collins believes that “that was a recurring theme as we were growing up—he would make sacrifices to keep independent.”7 Initially the Collins family resided at 8345 S. Prairie Avenue until Michelle was seven years old. Then they moved to Sixty-Seventh Street and Euclid Avenue in the Jackson Park Highlands neighborhood, just south of Jackson Park. Ann Collins worked as a Chicago Public Schools teacher while Rosecrain Collins opened a dental practice in the historic Hyde Park-Kenwood National Bank Building on East Fifty-Third Street. Collins describes Jackson Park Highlands as an integrated, middle-class neighborhood. “We lived on a block where there were literally no two of any nationality or race.” Collins remembers nearby neighbors from Argentina, Germany, and Great Britain. Susan Power, the award-winning Native American novelist, grew up nearby.

Collins eventually enrolled in the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where she excelled in math and graduated in 1978.

Her Laboratory School classmates included future investment chief executive John Rogers Jr. and future presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett.8 Collins and Ettelson remember being raised in largely secular households. Collins explains that neither of her parents were devoutly religious. Nevertheless, “we were baptized Presbyterian, my sister and I, but we ended up becoming members of the First Unitarian Church in Hyde Park. My mother’s still a member. Later on, I moved from there to Meadville Lombard Theological Society.”9 Ettelson describes a similar childhood experience. “I attended synagogue, but my mother was not religious at all.” Both of his parents were Reformed Jews, explains Ettelson. “My mother came out of the German Jewish tradition, which is, I would say, ultra-Reform.”10 Upon graduating from Francis Parker in 1976, Ettelson matriculated to Brown University in Rhode Island. There he majored and excelled in applied mathematics and economics, was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and received his Bachelor of Science degree, magna cum laude.11 In 1980, Ettelson returned to Chicago to enroll in the joint JD/MBA program at the

A building at the Francis W. Parker School, which John Ettelson attended from 1962 to 1976, located at 330 West Webster Avenue in Chicago, May 31, 1966.

A building at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Michelle Collins’s alma mater, located at 1362 E. Fifty-Ninth Street, Chicago, September 28, 1961.

Making History | 51

University of Chicago. “I felt a little bit more education would help distinguish me in a pool of candidates in what was then a competitive job environment,” recounts Ettelson. “It turned out to be the case,” he states, adding that “the legal education was, from an intellectual and academic standpoint, really interesting and appealing.”12 He graduated in 1984.13 Ettelson immediately joined William Blair as an investment banking associate. “I was the only person in corporate finance, as it was then called (now investment banking), hired that year,” remembers Ettelson. Corporate finance, according to Ettelson, was small with only fifteen to twenty individuals in the department, “a handful of folks,”14 reflective of how “it was a smaller industry then,” he admits.15 Collins took a different path to William Blair. In 1978, she enrolled in Yale University in Connecticut, where she was one of sixty-five African American students in her class. While she majored in economics, Collins was influenced by the young African American studies professors John W. Blassingame and Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. Upon graduating in 1982, she began working at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City. Collins was assigned to a group of young, newly-hired associates in charge of credit audits required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. “We were responsible for telling them what’s wrong with the bank, why we’re having these mistakes,” remembers Collins. “I spent most of my time in Germany and Asia, three or four weeks at a time, and then you’d come back and get reset for your next trip.”16 But Collins realized her successful auditing responsibilities worked to her disadvantage within Chase. “We caused all these headaches for this banker,” she explains. “He was not going to support me for going into his department.”17 Collins’s experience at Chase, however, was personally revelatory. “I knew I needed to be on the client side,” she explains. “I liked the people part, and I also knew I would understand the businesses better if I wasn’t just doing the numbers.”18 For that reason, she left Chase in 1984, enrolled in Harvard Business School in Boston, graduated two years later with a MBA degree, and joined William Blair & Company.19 Collins had been introduced to William Blair by her fellow Laboratory School alumnus John Rogers. “He started out there before he left to start Ariel Investments,” explains Collins. When Collins returned to Chicago to visit her family, she met Rogers for lunch. “I remember a couple times he introduced me to William McCormick Blair, who was still there in the business at 135 South LaSalle. So, I was familiar with William Blair.”20 William Blair & Company was founded in 1935 in Chicago as Blair, Bonner & Company by Francis Bonner and William McCormick Blair. Historically, the firm financed small- to medium-sized, growth-oriented companies. Bonner, Blair, and their fellow bankers were highly regarded for turning those relationships into long-term equity growth. In the 1930s the firm helped finance the expansion of companies such as Household Finance Corporation and Continental Casualty and Continental 52 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

William McCormick Blair walking with Mrs. Charles Barnett on May 9, 1914, at an unidentified event also attended by Mrs. E. S. Moore, Mrs. John A. Stevenson, and Clive Runnells.

American financier William McCormick Blair golfing with Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden and an unidentified man, c. 1926.

Aerial view of the Field Building (which later became the LaSalle National Bank Building) at 135 South LaSalle Street, September 12, 1932.

Making History | 53

Assurance companies (now CNA Insurance); in the 1970s they did the same with Molex, Oil-Dri Corporation, and Safety-Kleen. During the 1980s, William Blair avoided risk arbitrage and other non-client-focused trading operations, believing that these activities created conflicts of interest by placing investment firms in competition with their own investing clients. By 1985, Forbes reported that William Blair had the best record of any investment banking firm between 1975 and 1985 in underwriting initial public offerings of stocks—a 132 percent gain, or $2,320 for every $1,000 invested. In the words of Ned Jannotta, William Blair’s managing partner from 1977 to 1995 and later chairman, “The best way to make money for William Blair was to make money for its clients.”21 Ettelson and Collins benefitted from William Blair’s distinctive business philosophy. After 1980, the firm grew by adding services and recruiting top professionals rather than acquiring other firms. Moreover, the firm’s employee-owned private structure, which continued into the twenty-first century, was in recruiting and motivating key professionals like Collins and Ettelson.22 The two even shared an office upon Collins’s arrival.23 At different points, both Ettelson and Collins worked under the tutelage of David Coolidge and Dick Kiphart.24 The small size of William Blair provided both with numerous opportunities. “From an experience standpoint there weren’t a whole lot of people to compete with to work on transactions, so anything that was interesting, I worked on it by default,” confesses Ettelson.25 Ettelson and Collins recognize retrospectively that the comparatively small size of William Blair also facilitated a culture of mentoring among the moreexperienced partners. “More of the senior folks at the firm were in banking or in the corporate finance group,” explains Ettelson. “I had access to or worked with the then head of corporate finance, Dave Coolidge [later president and chief executive officer], and also Dick Kiphart.” He remembers working early in his career with Ned Jannotta, then head of the firm, a rare opportunity in the world of investment banking. “All three of them were great mentors,” says Ettelson.26 Ettelson retrospectively realizes that investment banking was “about to explode as an industry.” Before 1980, “the mergers and acquisitions business didn’t exist the way we think of it today,” he explains. “A whole variety of forces and changes in capital markets meant that the industry experienced a tremendous amount of growth in the 1980s and 1990s.”27 Between 1991 and 1996, William Blair & Company lead-managed or co-managed 196 equity underwriting transactions representing $13.6 billion in capital. The firm also expanded its debt finance services, becoming active in bond financing and bond trading. William Blair continued to serve traditional debt-issuing clients, such as private corporations and states, counties, municipalities, and school districts, while expanding their client base to encompass health care facilities, institutions of higher education, and transportation authorities.28 “By the 1990s,” concludes Ettelson, investment banking “became a business.”29 Collins developed her own expertise within William Blair, specifically with clients engaged primarily in distribution and direct marketing businesses.

“They were business-to-business or business-to-consumer,” according to Collins. “They wanted me to do the business-to-consumer because they didn’t have a lot of women in the group.”30 Her major clients ultimately included Henry Schein, Inc., Lands’ End, Inc., Coldwater Creek, Inc., McWhorter Technologies, Inc., and United Stationers, Inc., among others.

Collins later served on several of their corporate boards and advised clients on mergers and acquisitions.31 “I loved the people, the entrepreneurs, the people who really started those companies,” explains Collins.32 “You had ongoing relationships, the companies were continuing to grow, and you 54 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

William Blair & Company headquarters are now located in Chicago at 150 North Riverside Plaza in a 54-story high-rise, designed by Goettsch Partners and completed in 2017.

developed relationships with the management team.”33 In 1992, Collins became a principal partner in the corporate finance department.34 Collins developed a particularly close professional and sometimes contentious relationship with the entrepreneur Michael Krasny, the founder of Computer Discount Warehouse, later renamed CDW. While Collins prepared Krasny for CDW’s first initial public offering in 1993, he resisted her timeline. Collins remembers explaining to Krasny: “If you want to go public through William Blair, you’re going to have to trust me because I want people to buy into this before I throw it out there. It’s all about positioning.”35 Krasny relented, and the public offering proved enormously successful.

Collins continues to sit on Krasny’s foundation and CDW’s investment committee. “He’s still one of my closest friends,” adds Collins.36 Thirty years later Collins wistfully considers the success of CDW to be among her most satisfying accomplishments. “It went from a $200 million company with 50 to 100 employees to 5,000 people,” she points out. Krasny “didn’t measure it by how wealthy he was—he didn’t measure it by the revenue, although he cared about those things, but it was about the people who worked there.” In the end, Collins believes that her work with CDW “affected the most people in terms of well-being for those families.” And, she adds, “it was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done.”37 Ettelson also quickly moved up the ranks within William Blair. He became an investment banking partner in 1990. In 1996, he was named to head the mergers and acquisitions department within William Blair. Beginning in 2001, he ascended to the top leadership positions within the firm: chief financial officer (2001–2003), chief operations officer (2003–2004), president (2004–2021), chief executive officer (2004–2022), and chairman emeritus.38 William Blair & Company evolved into a more complex institution under Ettelson’s watch. “We have investment banking, which is mergers, acquisitions, and capital-raising for clients,” he explains. “We have a private wealth business, so we manage money for wealthy individuals and family groups.

And we have an institutional asset management business where we manage money for pension funds and corporate profit-sharing plans.” The range of institutions for the latter extend from the Chicago firefighter pension plan to the state of Florida municipal employees fund to a Walt Disney Company corporate pension plan. “There’s just a variety,” summarizes Ettelson, “that did not exist for us until the late 1990s.”39 In 2009, William Blair & Company still retained broad employee ownership with 172 principals, a large percentage of the professional staff. The organizational structure has allowed firm traditions to endure while at the same time encouraging new business initiatives. Many of these principals have spent their entire careers with William Blair, which regards them as invaluable intellectual capital.40 Michael Wong, a Morningstar financial analyst who covers investment banks, suspects that the very reason William Blair fared better than some larger, publicly-traded banks was because partners at a private firm use their own capital; they are more likely to invest cautiously over a longer term and can afford to wait for the payoff.41 Ettelson believes William Blair still provides a different kind of financial service. “We’ve chosen a different model, which is we don’t want to be everything to everybody. We want to do the things we do well, a narrow group of services, do them as well as we can, and be the best provider of the service that we’re offering,” Ettelson remarks. “If you’re going to hire us for what we do, we think we can provide a better service at that level than anybody else.”42 Ettelson does not consider the William Blair philosophy historically distinctive. “In some sense, Wall Street lived that way in the 1950s and 1960s, Making History | 55

maybe into the 1970s,” he believes. “Our model was not unique.”43 Investment banking, however, globalized. “Most institutions in the US before 2000 were primarily invested in US stocks,” suggests Ettelson. “The dot.com crash happened in 2001, the market went down. But international markets, which were not tech heavy, dropped less.”44 The lesson learned was that large institutional funds—state retirement programs such as the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and the Department of Retirement Systems of the State of Washington, university endowments, and other major pension plans—declined as much as forty percent in US markets. By contrast, international markets fell only ten or fifteen percent. Consequently, “there was a big push immediately to find international money management,” recounts Ettelson, “and we had a very good track record there.”45 In 1997, Collins cofounded her own private equity firm with John Svoboda, called Svoboda, Collins, LLC (later Svoboda Capital Partners), which invested in medium-sized distribution companies. Over the ensuing decade, Collins served as managing director and an advisory board member, a role in which she still serves. The firm managed more than $250 million of capital investment in middle-market business service companies and valueadded distribution businesses, engaging in management buyouts, leveraged recapitalizations, and growth equity investments.46 Finally, in 2007, Collins formed a consulting and financial advisory firm, initially called MC Advisory Services, LLC, and later Cambium LLC, where she remains president.47 Her management talents proved attractive. In 2008, “many people were looking for capital, except that there was no capital because the market had crashed,” Collins remembers. As a result, Collins says, “I did a lot of workouts—working capital management, thirteen-week cash flows, how to squeeze out a little bit more so you can keep in business until we get through this period.” As the market improved, “sometimes I could raise capital, sometimes I would recommend they go to different places, and sometimes made the calls for those people.” Over time, her role as an advisor for legal talent, corporate governance, and compensation expertise became central to her firm’s work.48 William Blair & Company also went through a transformation. Prior to 2000, the firm specialized in deals of less than $150 million.49 That changed in 2002. Under Ettelson’s leadership, William Blair served as lead manager of the J. M. Smucker Company’s $731 million acquisition of Jif® peanut butter and Crisco® shortening from Procter & Gamble. A client for two decades, Smucker’s leadership considered larger, international banks before choosing to stay with William Blair. Some of that had to do with John Ettelson. “Those other banks have the bigger reputations, but there is a continuity at Blair that you won’t find anywhere,” disclosed chairman Timothy Smucker at the time.

“They’ve seen where we’ve been and they know where we want to go.”

Ettelson recognized that the jam maker wanted to avoid increasing their debt load, so William Blair structured the purchase that enabled Smucker’s to acquire Jif without any debt.50 The event proved to be a turning point for William Blair. By 2012, under Ettelson’s leadership, the firm was engaged in financial transactions ranging from $200 million to more than $1 billion. These included the British buyout firm Charterhouse Capital Partners’s over $1 billion purchase of BARTEC Top Holding GmbH and the sale of the chemical division formerly owned by Northbrook, Illinois-based Old World Industries to Bangkok, Thailand-based Indorama Ventures for $795 million.51 These events illustrated how investment banking dramatically changed from 1980 to 2020. “When I started, we had a Chicago office,” points out Ettelson. “I think we had two people in Denver. And we started Atlanta in 56 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

1984.” William Blair did not have a New York office. “Corporate finance was for sure a transactional business—you helped companies raise capital in some fashion,” recounts Ettelson. “What we now think of as private wealth was mostly a brokerage business, an old retail brokerage business.” That singular corporate structure no longer exists. “The business evolved into more holistic wealth management—thinking about the whole financial side of your ledger.” According to Ettelson, “The banking business began to ask: How do we service you more broadly from a service standpoint?”52 Consequently, by 2020, Blair employed approximately 2,000 people globally, about 1,100 in Chicago and 900 elsewhere in the world.53 Collins believes something has been lost with these global transformations.

“The whole private equity has institutionalized from when I go back to my college days. Bonds, emerging markets, private capital, private equity, private credit—it’s just all institutionalized, it’s commoditized.” She recognizes that most of this was inevitable. However, “the ability to create value, which for me comes from finding these entrepreneurs and working with them, those days are gone. Now it is all about finance.”54 William Blair’s culture also encouraged partners and associates to actively engage with Chicago’s philanthropic and civic communities. During the twentieth century, for example, William Blair fostered a national reputation for successfully floating bonds for cultural institutions in Chicago, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Shedd Aquarium, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Science and Industry.55 “William Blair always had a civic engagement element, a civic philanthropic element, as part of our culture,” claims Ettelson, and the firm promoted different kinds of engagement, “however you want to do it.”56 As lifelong Chicagoans, Ettelson and Collins exploited that cultural activism throughout their professional lives. Ettelson has served on the Chicago Chairman’s Council for Cradles to Crayons and the boards of the Northwestern Medical Group, the Executives’ Club of Chicago, and World Business Chicago.

He is an active member of Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, an executive advisor to the Metropolitan Planning Council, the past chairman of the board of the Economic Club of Chicago, and a life trustee at his alma mater, the Francis W. Parker School.57 In 2019, Ettelson received the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center Humanitarian Award for his active engagement in philanthropy and volunteerism. He joined the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center board as a trustee in 2021.58 Ettelson takes considerable pride in his service as chair of the board of trustees of the Lincoln Park Zoo, an institution only a short walk from his childhood home. He reminds anyone willing to listen that Chicago’s zoo is one of only three free urban zoos in the United States. “There are not too many free urban zoos in the country.”

Ettelson adds, “In the leadership in

Undated photograph of birds in the aviary at Lincoln Park Zoo by Japanese American photojournalist Jun Fujita (1888‒1963), who worked for the Chicago Evening Post and Chicago Daily-News.

Making History | 57

the world of zoos, in terms of the animal care, in terms of conservation efforts around the globe, and in terms of educational programs, the Lincoln Park Zoo is an unbelievable institution.”59 Ettelson also considers the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, where he serves as chairman of the board, a vital institution. “We need to have a nonpartisan organization with no particular policy angle,” he asserts. “A knowledgeable populace is important, and engagement is important, because the world’s going to happen whether we like it or not, so we are better off thinking how we shape it in some fashion that we like versus have it happen to us and be shaped for us,” insists Ettelson. “I love the organization.”60 Collins has been similarly engaged, serving as a trustee or board member of the Field Museum, the Chicago History Museum, the Rush-PresbyterianSt. Luke’s Medical Center, the Erikson Institute, the Chicago Urban League, the YMCA, the Meadville Lombard Theological Society, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Public Library Foundation, National Louis University, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the Renaissance Schools Fund.61 Collins’s involvement in professional and civic organizations in Chicago has been equally impressive, including The Chicago Network, the Chicago Finance Exchange, Women Corporate Directors, the executive committee of the Economic Club of 58 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

John Ettelson poses with his family at the 2022 Making History Awards, which took place on June 8 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago.

Men outside the Chicago Urban League Building, located at 3032 South Wabash Avenue in 1922.

Chicago, the Commercial Club of Chicago, the Henry Crown Fellows Program of the Aspen Institute, and the National Association of Corporate Directors and Black Corporate Directors.62 Collins and Ettelson remain staunch and enthusiastic proponents of Chicago.

“From a physical beauty standpoint, I think this is one of the most—and I’ve been to a lot of cities in the world—this is one of the more attractive cities,” Ettelson insists. “You see this all the time when tourists come here and they’re surprised at the physical beauty of the city.”63 Collins concurs. “Chicago has amazing assets, just amazing assets, and we’re pretty humble about them.” She recognizes that short-term challenges lie ahead.

“But we need to really lean into those assets because we need them to perform so we can fix some of the past problems and move forward into the next century, and not lose our place.”64 Timothy J. Gilfoyle teaches history at Loyola University Chicago and is on the editorial board of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American History.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the collection of the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise specified. 50, left: courtesy of Michelle Collins; right: courtesy of John Ettelson. 51, top: ST-15002796-0014, Chicago Sun-Times collection; bottom: HB-24639-A, Hedrich-Blessing Collection. 52, top: ICHi-076906; Jack Palmer, photographer; bottom: ICHi-176459-001A. 53, HB-01325-J, HedrichBlessing Collection. 54, Uploaded by Go Chicago for Wikimedia Commons. 57, ICHi-059465; Jun Fujita, photographer. 58, top: courtesy of Kyle Flubacker Photography; bottom: ICHi-040220. 59, courtesy of Kyle Flubacker Photography.

Michelle Collins presents John Ettelson with the Bertha Honoré Palmer Making History Award for Distinction in Civic Leadership on June 8, 2022.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The best introductions to John Ettelson and Michelle Collins appear on the websites of William Blair & Company (https://www.williamblair.com/Bios/John-Ettelson) and Cambium, Inc., respectively. An earlier interview of Collins appears in The HistoryMakers Video Oral History Interview with Michelle L. Collins, February 21, 2008, The HistoryMakers African American Video Oral History Collections, 1900 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, accessed March 3, 2023, https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/michelle-l-collins-41. For articles on John Ettelson, see Lynne Marek, “Hiring, M&A Up at Bank,” Crain’s Chicago Business, Nov. 24, 2012, accessed Apr. 12, 2022, https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/ 20121124/ISSUE01/311249989/william-blair-investment-banking-unit-growswhile-rivals-shrink; Christine Williamson, “New CEO at William Blair,” Crain’s Chicago Business, Jan. 13, 2022, accessed April 12, 2022, https:// www.chicagobusiness.com/finance-banking/william-blair-names-brent-gledhill-ceo-replacing-john-ettelson. F. Cyril James, The Growth of Chicago Banks (New York: Harper, 1938), 2 vols., provides a useful introduction to the early history of Chicago banking.

Making History | 59

E N D N OT E S

17. Collins, interview.

39. Ettelson, interview.

1. John Ettelson, oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, May 26, 2022, deposited in the collection of the Chicago History Museum (hereafter, Ettelson, interview); “John Ettelson,” William Blair, Sept. 30, 2021, accessed Jan. 22, 2022, https://www.williamblair.com/Bios/JohnEttelson.

18. Collins, interview.

40. “History,” William Blair.

19. HistoryMakers, interview.

41. Lynne Marek, “Hiring, M&A Up at Bank,” Crain’s Chicago Business, Nov. 24, 2012, accessed Apr. 12, 2022, https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article /20121124/ISSUE01/311249989/williamblair-investment-banking-unit-growswhile-rivals-shrink.

2. Michelle L. Collins,” Prabook, 2023, accessed March 3, 2023, https://prabook.com/web/michelle_l.collins/16741 20. The quote was for the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago’s Promise Award in 2018. See “Ximena N. Beltran Quan Kiu,” Remezcla Newsletter, undated, accessed April 4, 2023, https://ximenabqk.com/about-1.

3. Ettelson, interview.

4. Most of this information appears in Ettelson, interview. Also see “John Ettelson,” LinkedIn, accessed April 12, 2022, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ john-ettelson-374b7380/; “John Ettelson,” Radaris: People Search, 2023, accessed May 20, 2023, (date of birth).

5. The HistoryMakers Video Oral History Interview with Michelle L. Collins, February 21, 2008, The HistoryMakers African American Video Oral History Collections, 1900 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, accessed March 3, 2023, (hereafter HistoryMakers, interview).

6. Michelle Collins, oral history interview

by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, May 17, 2023, deposited in the collection of the Chicago History Museum (hereafter, Collins, interview).

7. Collins, interview; HistoryMakers, interview.

8. Collins, interview; HistoryMakers, interview.

9. Collins, interview.

10. Ettelson, interview.

11. “John Ettelson,” LinkedIn. 12. Ettelson, interview.

13. For dates on Ettelson’s education, see “John Ettelson,” William Blair.

14. Ettelson, interview.

15. Ettelson, interview.

16. Collins, interview. For dates in this paragraph, see HistoryMakers, interview.

20. Collins, interview.

21. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “Banking on Chicago: Interviews with Ned Jannotta and Martin Koldyke,” Chicago History 36, no. 1 (Fall 2008), 57 (Jannotta quote); Chicago Tribune, Feb. 17, 1986.

Also see Edgar Jannotta, oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, May 9, 2006, deposited in the collection of the Chicago History Museum; “Edgar D. Jannotta,” NNDB tracking the entire world, 2019, accessed May 20, 2023, https://www.nndb.com/people/158/000 127774/.

22. “History,” William Blair, 2009, accessed July 1, 2009, http://www.wmblair.com/ pages/firm_history.asp.

42. Ettelson, interview.

43. Ettelson, interview.

44. Ettelson, interview.

45. Ettelson, interview.

46. HistoryMakers, interview.

47. “Michelle L. Collins,” Economic Club of Chicago, 2023, accessed April 9, 2023, https://econclubchi.org/leader/michellel-collins/; HistoryMakers, interview.

48. Collins, interview.

23. Collins, interview.

49. Marek, “Hiring, M&A Up at Bank.”

24. Collins, interview; Ettelson, interview.

50. “Framed by Tradition,” Forbes, Nov. 11, 2002, accessed Apr. 12, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/ 1111/101.html?sh=5c834dde6986

25. Ettelson, interview.

26. Ettelson, interview.

27. Ettelson, interview.

28. “History,” William Blair.

29. Ettelson, interview.

30. Collins, interview.

31. HistoryMakers, interview.

32. Collins, interview.

33. Collins, interview.

34. HistoryMakers, interview.

35. Collins, interview.

36. Collins, interview.

37. Collins, interview. For a summary of the history of CDW, see “CDW Computer Centers, Inc. History,” Funding Universe, originally in International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 2003), vol. 52, accessed May 23, 2023, http://www.fundinguniverse.com/ company-histories/cdw-computercenters-inc-history/.

38. “John Ettelson,” William Blair; “John Ettelson,” LinkedIn; Christine Williamson, “New CEO at William Blair,” Crain’s Chicago Business, Jan. 13, 2022, accessed Apr. 12, 2022, https://www.chicagobusiness.com/financ e-banking/william-blair-names-brentgledhill-ceo-replacing-john-ettelson.

60 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring/Summer 2023

51. Marek, “Hiring, M&A Up at Bank.”

52. Ettelson, interview.

53. Ettelson, interview.

54. Collins, interview.

55. “History,” William Blair.

56. Ettelson, interview.

57. “John Ettelson,” William Blair.

58. “John Ettelson,” William Blair.

59. Ettelson, interview.

60. Ettelson, interview.

61. “Michelle L. Collins,” Economic Club of Chicago, 2023, accessed Apr. 9, 2023, https://econclubchi.org/leader/michellel-collins/; Michelle L. Collins,” The Chicago Network, 2023, accessed March 3, 2023, https://www.thechicagonetwork.org/members/michelle-l-collins/; HistoryMakers, interview.

62. HistoryMakers, interview; “Michelle Collins,” AGLN Aspen Institute, undated, accessed April 9, 2023, https://agln.aspeninstitute.org/ profile/3322; “Michelle L. Collins,” Economic Club of Chicago.

63. Ettelson, interview.

64. Collins, interview.