On the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, CHM director of curatorial affairs Joy L. Bivins reflects on his assassination. On this date fifty years ago, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Today, around our city and throughout the More
CHM curatorial assistant Brittany Hutchinson reflects on her work for our newest exhibition, Remembering Dr. King: 1929–1968. The entrance to Remembering Dr. King. Photograph by CHM staff At the Chicago History Museum, we are honoring the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with an exhibition, Remembering Dr. King: 1929–1968. It includes objects More
Inside the Collection is a video series that invites you into the Chicago History Museum’s storage spaces to explore unusual, interesting artifacts from our vast collection. In this installment, senior collection manager Britta Keller Arendt shows us the skin of the serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. This artifact came to More
For Women’s History Month, head into storage with CHM collection technician Jessica McPheters for a closer look at two artifacts that document twentieth-century political strife and women’s suffrage in Chicago. In the summer of 2016, the collections team began working on an inventory of the Decorative and Industrial Arts (DIA) collection at the Chicago History More
As part of Monday Night Nitrates, our weekly photograph series, the Chicago History Museum collections staff is blogging about the process of digitizing approximately 35,000 nitrate negatives, a project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. In this post, CHM paper conservator Carol Turchan writes about how the negatives were prepared for digitization More