Consulting firms are now the brains behind most museums–and the reason they’re looking as homogenous as shopping malls. Last week’s national meeting of the American Association of Museums at McCormick Place turned out to be a showcase for these firms as well as a window on some local organizations. Among them: the Adler Planetarium, which responded to the meeting’s clearly desperate theme, “Why Museums Matter,” by presenting its own identity crisis as a case study.
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The Adler was built and donated to the city by Sears, Roebuck executive Max Adler. When it opened in 1930 it was the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere. A new theater was added in 1999 (the building now houses two), and the following year the museum logged a record half million visitors. But the party was short-lived: president Paul Knappenberger told the AAM audience that after 9/11 both attendance and government funding took a dive. Attendance immediately dropped 30 percent, he said. (It’s now back up to about 400,000). City funding, which had been $2.5 million annually, has fallen to $2 million (the museum’s annual budget is $11 million). With the Adler’s 75th anniversary on the horizon, Knappenberger said, it seemed like a good time to reassess.
That sounds like a recipe for the Adler Museum of Your Very Own Amazing and Extreme Space Adventure, but Knappenberger said museum officials took the message to heart: “Not everyone is as interested in astronomy as we are.” And just as they were considering “transforming” the institution by focusing on space exploration, Lovell dropped in, not quite out of the blue. Local artists Omri Amrany and Julie Rotblatt-Amrany, who created the bronze statue of Michael Jordan at the United Center, wanted to do a similar likeness of Lovell; they wondered if the Adler would be interested. Lovell came in to the museum to talk about it, Knappenberger said, and they “hit it off.” What Lovell wanted, over the long term, “was what we wanted–to inspire the next generation of explorers.” Lovell wound up parking his collection of space-travel mementos in the Adler on long-term loan, and his story, including his having guided Apollo 13 back to earth after an explosion on board, presented as a lesson in not giving up, became the core of the museum’s new exhibit. The Adler commissioned the statue, now installed in the museum lobby.
a The brand-new Chicago Cultural Alliance introduced itself and its effort to pull diverse and independent ethnic organizations together for the greater good. Incorporated last fall after nearly three years of talks under the auspices of the Field Museum, the CCA has 20 members–all small community-based museums–and two big partners: the Chicago History Museum and the Field. The plan is to approach foundations together for funding and to share resources.
Despite a dire shortage of portable johns and some scary overcrowding, the Chicago Loop Alliance is calling its Looptopia event a success because it drew more than twice the 100,000 people expected. Executive director Ty Tabing says that planning for the all-night party took two years and included a scouting trip to similar events in Europe. He says inconveniences like huge (and disappointed) lines at venues, a lack of late-night service on the el, and closed parks, buildings, and businesses that left Looptopians aimless and restless were merely the result of “capacity issues” after “a lot of people underestimated the event’s drawing power.” Tabing says Looptopia was intended to “rebrand this area” as an exciting place and that the date was chosen because hotels typically have empty rooms over Mother’s Day weekend and the east Loop colleges would still be in session. He says organizers “wanted to engage the college students” but thinks if they do it again, “programming changes” might help tilt the wee-hours crowd toward a more balanced (read: older, more sober) demographic. He also thinks on the next round more businesses will be willing to stay open. Tabing says talks with the city, police, aldermen, and Alliance members will determine whether Looptopia will rise again: “We hope to have a decision about next year by mid-June.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): The “Shoot for the Moon” exhibit, including a new sculpture of James Lovell and the restored Gemini XII capsule/ Lovell photo by Bred Kramer Photograpy.
