The Vanderpoel Art Association will host a presentation “At Home at the Fair: Chicago Artists at the World’s Columbian Exposition” on Saturday, January 25, 2025 at 1 p.m. Independent art historian Wendy Greenhouse will discuss what Chicago’s fine artists brought to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
Although little noticed at the time and in posterity, Chicagoans contributed to the decoration of the exposition’s buildings and grounds and submitted significant paintings and sculptures to the vast but exclusive art exhibition in the fair’s Fine Arts Building. What do their contributions reveal about Chicago’s artistic identity and ambitions as the city used the occasion of the fair to promote its arrival as a sophisticated metropolis on the world’s stage?” This lecture is drawn from Greenhouse’s essay for the forthcoming catalog for the National Mexican Fine Arts Museum’s recent exhibition Arte Diseño Xicágo II, which compared the art of Chicagoans and Mexicans exhibited at the World’s Fair.
The lecture will be held in the Vanderpoel Art Gallery in the Ridge Park Fieldhouse (9625 S. Longwood Drive in Chicago). The event is free and open to the public.
