The Ukrainian National Museum, Chicago

Posted on March 30, 2022 by admin

Tucked away in an unassuming brick building, across a small street from Sts. Volodymyr & Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church in Chicago, is the Ukrainian National Museum.

High time for a visit, I thought on Sunday. It isn’t a large museum, but it’s home to a fair number of artifacts and a good amount of text and photos illustrating the history and culture of Ukraine. More than 10,000 items, according to the museum.

One of the museum’s rooms is devoted to Ukrainian Cossacks. Or, to use the Ukrainian transliteration, Kosaks. I have to admit I scarcely knew much about the difference among the various Cossacks, and even now I only know a little more, byzantine as the centuries-long subject is.

Here’s a small snippet from the — shall we say, complicated nature of Cossack history — lifted directly from the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine. It’s only a very small part of the whole picture.

With the permission of the Polish government Cossack regiments were formed in Korsun (Korsun regiment), Bratslav (Bratslav regiment), Fastiv (Fastiv regiment), and Bohuslav (Bohuslav regiment) under the command of Cossack colonels, headed by an acting hetman, Col Samiilo Samus from Bohuslav. But the actual head of the Right-Bank Cossacks was Semen Palii, colonel of Fastiv and Bila Tserkva; he led the Right-Bank Cossacks in their fight against Polish rule and oppression by the nobility and for the unification of Right-Bank Ukraine and Left-Bank Ukraine under the rule of Hetman Ivan Mazepa (the uprising of 1702). This unification was realized in 1704.

Portraits of Ukrainian Cossack hetmans hang on the museum’s walls, with detailed text about their deeds. In nearby cases are weapons, clothes, coins and other cool Cossack stuff. As interesting or admirable as the museum’s other items were, these were my favorites.

Another major room contains somewhat newer artifacts, including displays of ornate Ukrainian clothing and very many Easter eggs (pysanky) done up in that famed, colorful and intricate Ukrainian style. (Singular, pysanka.)

Again from the encyclopedia: “The pysanka (literally, ‘written egg’) is produced by a complex technique. An initial design on the egg is done in beeswax, which is applied to the surface with a special instrument called a kystka (a small, metal, conic tube attached to a wooden handle).

“The egg is then dipped in yellow dye. Then those elements of the design that are to be yellow are covered with wax and the egg is dipped in a red dye (sometimes two shades of red are used). After the surfaces that are to be red are covered with wax, the egg is dipped in an intense, dark dye (violet or black).

“So that the color will adhere well, the egg is sometimes washed with vinegar or alum before being dyed. When the design is completed, the egg is heated to melt off the wax.”

Other rooms featured more recent history. That of course means the awful history of Ukraine in the 20th century, most especially the Holodomor, which merits its own room, full of harrowing photos, testimony and statistics, and not forgetting where to lay the blame: Stalin and his henchmen.

I wasn’t alone in the room. A man and a woman, maybe a few years older than I am, expressed their surprise to a docent, who was also in the room, that such a thing had happened. They’d never heard of it. If I didn’t have some interest in the history of the Soviet Union — one of those places where the history was entirely too interesting for the well-being of its inhabitants — I might not have either, so I won’t judge them too harshly (though it’s easier to be a bit peeved at the apathy toward history education in this country).

But there’s always more to know. I didn’t know much about the subject of another room: Ukrainian immigration to other places after WWII. Most striking in that room was an enormous map, nearly from floor to ceiling, locating all of the Ukrainian Displaced Persons camps in the western zones of occupied Germany in the late ’40s.

There were more than 100 of them. Something worth knowing now that millions of Ukrainians have been displaced again.

“The Allies intended to repatriate all these victims of Nazi Germany and therefore organized them by nationality,” Jan-Hinnerk Antons wrote in Harvard Ukrainian Studies. “However, two misconceptions in their approach to the problem soon proved troublesome.

“First, the number of people refusing repatriation was much higher than anyone had expected. Second, nationality was by no means congruent with citizenship — and it was the latter that was assumed as the basis for repatriation.

“The very existence of more than one hundred Ukrainian Displaced Persons camps in the western zones of occupied Germany was testament to the Ukrainian DPs’ resistance to forced repatriation and their struggle for recognition of their nationality.”

Many of them eventually came to the United States. Including the family of the docent, a resident of Ukrainian Village who had been born in a DP camp. She told us her immediate family had survived the war, but many other relatives had not. Growing up, she said she heard about members of an extended family she never knew.

Finally, a much smaller room in the Ukrainian National Museum tells a less troubling tale: the story of the Ukrainian pavilion at the 1933 Century of Progress world’s fair in Chicago, the lesser-known cousin of the 1893 world’s fair. Remarkably, the structure was a project of Ukrainian immigrants in Chicago, and not sponsored by any government. Least of all the Soviet Union, which was busy murdering Ukrainians wholesale at that very moment in history.

The Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

Posted on November 10, 2021 by admin

I saw Oakland City Hall during my recent Bay Area visit, so I thought it only reasonable that I see 1915-vintage San Francisco City Hall as well. I already knew it is doozy, designed by Arthur Brown Jr. to replace one damaged in 1906.

So on the morning of October 30, I made my way to the building, which looks as grand as any U.S. state capitol, and more than some.

It even inspires selfies.

Unfortunately, it was closed on a Saturday morning.

Facing away from City Hall.

According to an old and pitted plaque in the ground, this public space is officially the Joseph L. Alioto Performing Arts Piazza. Wonder if anyone actually calls it that. Google Maps calls it Civic Center Plaza.

Across Larkin St. from the plaza is a tent city, behind a fence on four sides. There is good aerial view of it at this New York Post article (why that paper cares, I couldn’t say). It’s a city-sponsored experiment in dealing with pandemic-era homelessness.

From the ground, only a small part is visible.

I hadn’t come this way just to see City Hall or the nearby tent city. Rather, I was killing time before the opening of the Asian Art Museum, which faces City Hall.

The museum’s subhead — that’s what I’m going to call it — is the Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture, reflecting the fact that the businessman of that name gave $15 million to museum to seed its relocation from space shared with the de Young Museum to its current location, in the former SF Main Library.

The building, designed by George W. Kelham, was completed in 1917 to replace one destroyed — you guessed it — by the 1906 earthquake. It in turn was damaged in 1989, and replaced by a new main library not far away. Seismic activity is just a fact of remaking the city, it seems.

These are slightly embarrassing times for the Asian Art Museum. Turns out the wealthy businessman whose collection was the basis for its splendid collection — Avery Brundage — reportedly had Nazi sympathies or at least anti-Semitic tendencies and (something much better documented) was on the wrong side of history in 1968 when, as IOC president, he had Tommie Smith and John Carlos kicked out the Olympics for their Black Power Salute. Oops.

For his retro-gressions, the museum removed a bust of Brundage from the foyer of the building last year. It has not, I noticed, removed the acknowledgements with each piece of art that came from the Brundage collection. Give it time.

What a collection it is. A small sample:

Greek-inspired art from the Indus River Valley, 2nd century CE. I’d heard of that, but don’t remember seeing any examples.

Thai, 11th century CE.

A detail of those monkeys.

Indian, 13th century CE.

Burmese, 15th century CE.

Chinese, 18th century CE.

Korean, 18th century CE.

Japanese, 21st century CE.

All together, the museum has more than 18,000 works in its permanent collection, with more than 2,000 items on display at any given time, variously from South Asia, Iran and Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, China, Korea and Japan.

The galleries mostly obscure whatever remains of the original interior —

— but I noticed an unlocked door that took me to this space, which is also used as a gallery, though not a readily visible one.

Wow. The museum shouldn’t hide this space away.

Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum

Posted on August 16, 2021 by admin

Usually it isn’t a good idea to quote promotional material too much, since it has a tendency to exaggerate. But for Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum in Fairbanks, I’m going to borrow an entire paragraph from its site, so fitting is it.

This “living museum” is home to over 95 pre-World War II automobiles, with 65 to 75 stunningly lit and staged rare automobiles at all times. This expansive collection encompasses horseless carriages, steamers, electric cars, speedsters, cyclecars, midget racers and ’30s classics.

Not just stunningly lit and staged, but each vehicle is described by a concise and expertly written sign. Also, the museum displays period clothing on mannequins, artfully interspersed with the autos, so that the two kinds of artifacts complement each other to evoke their precise period in the history. Yet another array of period detail is found in the large photographs from early 20th-century Alaska on the walls.

As if that isn’t enough, popular music of the period — from roughly the first four decades of the 20th century — plays not quite in the background. Unobtrusively at first, but then you begin to hear it as a worthwhile background. Once I started listening to the songs, I found the variety remarkable: the popular jazz tunes you’d expect, but also other kinds of hits from the period, such as a few opera or opera-inspired songs.

The museum entrance gives no hint of what’s ahead. But the place doesn’t need a fancy, name-architect structure; it’s got content.

Once inside, the museum’s sizable scope becomes clear.

Most of the vehicles have been restored to factory appearance, or at least to highly presentable, and according to the museum, all but a handful are functional. There were many vehicles I’d never heard of.

A 1901 De Dion-Bourton.

A 1903 Toledo. “This is the only gasoline-powered Toledo known to survive.”

A 1917 Owen Magnetic.

Plus others, such as an Argonne, Auburn, Grant, Heine-Velox, Hupmobile and Oakland. The display also included a 1911 EMF. Nickname: “Every Morning Frustration.”

Plus plenty of models I knew, but maybe not much about their early models beyond the names: Brush, Cadillac, Lincoln, Packard and Rambler.

Plus at least one celebrity car. Mostly the museum doesn’t go in for that sort of thing, but it does have Wallace Reid’s 1919 McFarlan. It was a speedy car to suit Reid, whose motto seems to have, “die young, stay pretty.” He did.

I could make a entire long posting from the hood ornaments, nameplates, horns and lamps I saw.

Let’s not forget the period clothing. Tended to be on the posh side, but what else survives?

The fur set in the second picture is described as men’s wear. This is early 20th-century Alaska, after all.

This displayed not so much the bonnet or the dress.
But rather the eyeglasses. Nearby was a glass display case of glasses from the period.

The Museum of the North

Posted on August 15, 2021 by admin

The flight from Seattle to Fairbanks actually isn’t that long, only three hours or so. I expect getting to Anchorage is even shorter, something to keep in mind for the future.
I could see parts of Vancouver Island not long after takeoff, including the city of Victoria from on high. Only a few days earlier, I’d seen it from a vista in Olympic National Park, far away but distinct on the shore of the Salish Sea.

Soon, however, British Columbia and whatever I might have seen of southeast Alaska were obscured by clouds. Closer to Fairbanks, the clouds thinned, and in places I got to see just how undeveloped the interior of Alaska is. A structure here, one there, a place that looked like cultivated land (maybe giant cabbages), but not much else manmade.

I arrived in Fairbanks on July 26 to find partly cloudy skies and comfortable temps, in the low 70s. It was mid-afternoon, with a lot of light ahead, so I made my way to the Museum of the North, which is on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and thoughtfully open until 7 pm during the summer. Seemed like a good choice for the first place I went in Alaska. Not much else looks like it in Fairbanks.
“Joan Soranno and the GDM/HGA architectural team designed the building to convey a sense of Alaska,” says the museum web site. Hm.

A sign inside the building expands on that idea: “The design is a composition of four abstract forms. Angled, curved, tipped and cantilevered, these forms reflect the lines and shapes found in Alaska’s coastlines, mountains and glaciers.”

The exhibits cover a lot of ground. “The museum’s research collections — 2.5 million artifacts and specimens — represent millions of years of biological diversity and thousands of years of cultural traditions in the North,” the museum says.

The university began exhibiting artifacts as long ago as 1929, with various places for its displays, but the current building wasn’t completed until 2006.

“The collections are organized into 10 disciplines: archaeology, birds, documentary film, earth sciences, ethnology/history, fine arts, fishes/marine invertebrates, insects, mammals, and plants,” the museum says.

Let’s start with one of those mammals. He greets you at the entrance to the first-floor gallery.

Followed by plenty of other sizeable creatures of a stuffed nature.

Along with prehistoric relics.

The first-floor Gallery of Alaska is organized geographically, with sections for the Southeast, South-Central, Interior, Western Arctic Coast and Southeast. The exhibits include much more than large stuffed animals.

The Native presence is well covered.

Nods to the Russian period.

And the early U.S. years.

If genuine, there’s a 19-oz. gold nugget in there among others nearly that large. I assume the display is wired against theft.

On the second floor is the Rose Berry Alaska Art Gallery, which includes an eclectic mix. The only thing all the works have in common is that they were created by Alaskan artists.

“Arctic Winter” by Theodore R. Lambert, 1936.

“Iron Eskimo” by T. Mike Croskrey, 2002.

“Great Alaska Outhouse Experience” by Craig N. Buchanan, 2005

That one has an interactive element. You can enter the structure and sit down. You’ll then be up close to the walls and something of a ceiling.

All in all, the museum turned out to be a pretty good way to start my visit to Alaska.

The Edsel & Eleanor Ford House

Posted on June 21, 2021 by admin

Major thunderstorm last night, especially around 10:30, when I had a mind to take out the trash. Soon my phone started making a racket. It was sounding a tornado warning. That and the lightning and the heavy rain persuaded me to postpone my outdoors task until around midnight, when the storm had blown over. Naperville, a good ways to the south, had the worst of it.

Last Friday afternoon in greater Detroit, we made our way to Grosse Pointe Shores to see the Edsel & Eleanor Ford House, a 20,000-square-foot mansion on the shore of Lake St. Clair completed in 1928. The Fords hired Albert Kahn, who seems to have done everything in metro Detroit, to design the place.

The Fords had liked the cottages they’d seen in England, especially in the Cotswolds, including such features as stone roofs, vine-covered walls and lead-paned windows. Not only did the Ford House design reflect English inspiration, the Fords had paneling, fixtures and other bits and pieces of Old England brought over for installation in the new mansion, back when that sort of thing was possible.

All in all, a handsome set of rooms to wander through. Such as barrel-vaulted Gallery, the largest room in the house. Sizable events were (and are) held here.
“The Gallery… is paneled with sixteenth-century oak linenfold relief carved wood paneling,” notes Wiki. “Its hooded chimneypiece is from Wollaston Hall in Worcestershire, England; the timber-framed house had been demolished in 1925 and its dismantled elements and fittings were in the process of being dispersed… [the] barrel-vaulted ceiling for the Gallery was modeled on one at Boughton Malherbe, Kent, England.”

A handsome living room. Too handsome ever to be a living space, I think, and no doubt clutter wasn’t allowed, or at least the staff made sure it disappeared.

This looks more livable: an upstairs art deco bedroom, one of the more modern rooms designed by Walter Dorwin Teague. You can imagine leaving newspapers and magazines and books lying around in a room like this, with a globe or two sitting around as well. Not visible in my picture are the number of radios the Fords had built into various pieces of furniture.

An attached complementary bathroom.

In Edsel Ford’s private office, I noticed a flag behind glass.

Adm. Byrd had taken the flag with him on his flight over the South Pole, and gave it to Ford — who had supported Byrd’s expedition, besides being the president of the company that built his airplane, a Ford trimotor — along with a handwritten letter. In another part of house is a flag Byrd took with him on his North Pole expedition.

One more item inside the house: a copy of a portrait of Edsel Ford by Diego Rivera. The artist wasn’t so much of a red that he wouldn’t take money from a leading captain of industry.

Outside, as you’d expect, the house has an expansive view of the lake.

Plus swarms of mayflies, some of which decided to land on my shirt. They didn’t bite or do anything but appear in large numbers in my vicinity.

We asked a Ford House worker about them, learning that they’re known locally as fishflies. This is their high season, when they are most likely to swarm.

St. Joseph, Joliet

Posted on March 10, 2021 by admin

The iron works in Joliet might be ruins these days, but St. Joseph Catholic Church, one of the city’s major church buildings, still stands on Chicago St. downtown. It’s the second church on the site, built in 1905 to serve Slovenian immigrants, many of whom worked in the local iron and steel mills.

By the time we got there on Sunday, masses were over, and it might have been closed in the afternoon even under normal circumstances. Still, we got a good look at the exterior.

“The St. Joseph community includes Slovenian attire and music in its Masses, offers one Mass in Slovenian each month, refers to the Virgin Mary by her Slovenian name of Marija Pomagaj and holds a celebration for St. Nicholas Day, which is a tradition in Slovenia,” Shaw Media reported on the occasion of the parish’s 125th anniversary, including some interior shots.

Charles Wallace, an Irish-born Chicago architect (1871-1949), designed St. Joseph. He apparently did a fair number of churches in the Chicago area during the golden age of church building for large immigrant communities.

Across the street from the church is this building, headquarters of the Slovenian Union of America as well as the Slovenian Women’s Union of America Heritage Museum. The building dates from 1910.

Closed, of course. My kind of little museum, though, so we might visit some other time. Might visit Slovenia some other time, too, with any luck. I hear it’s a pleasant place to visit.

National Museum of Mexican Art ’15

Posted on November 8, 2020 by admin

Five years ago this month, I made it to the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen, in time to see its annual Día de los Muertos exhibit. This year it was cancelled as an in-person event, as you’d think. No visiting the Day of the Dead exhibit in person, to reduce the chance of Death coming your way.

I haven’t visited since, though there’s still time to see this year’s exhibit virtually, which is probably interesting, but not as satisfying as being there. If this year has taught us anything, it’s that primary experience is primary.

At the National Museum of Mexican Art, I experienced art skulls.

Two Puebla artists, Jose Antonio Cazabal Castro and Silverio Feliciano Reyes Sarmiento, created this monumental altar for Day of the Dead celebrations in the town of Huaquechula in the state of Puebla. Remembering a boy, looks like.

One more.
A detail, most of it really, of “Skeletons of Quinn/Calacas de Quinn,” a 2015 work by Hugo Crosthwaite of Baja California.

Dickson Mounds Museum

Posted on November 3, 2020 by admin

Got up early to vote this morning, since I believe that visiting the polls for a few minutes isn’t any riskier than going to a grocery store. Also, I am just mossbacked enough to want to vote on election day, just as my parents and grandparents et al. did, though I don’t begrudge anyone else the vote at some other convenient time or place.

It only took a few minutes. Few other people were there at the time. I’ve seen more in mid-day, especially during the 2008 election. Only one thing on the ballot made me smile this year: Willie Wilson, candidate for U.S. Senate from the Willie Wilson Party. That’s the best name for a party since the Rent is Too Damn High.

A few miles outside of Lewistown, Illinois, is the Dickson Mounds Museum. As the sign says, it’s a branch of the Illinois State Museum.

We arrived just after it opened at 10 on October 17. I hadn’t visited any museums of any kind since the Getty Villa back in February, for obvious reasons. But I figured the risk of infection at a place like Dickson Mounds was very low. For one thing — the main thing, actually — almost no one else was there, even on a Saturday.

And I mean no one. Entrance is free, so we didn’t have to interact with the woman behind the entrance counter. There might have been a few other employees of the museum around, but we didn’t see them. As we were leaving less than a hour later, we saw a couple with a small child entering. That was it.

The main museum building.

Completed in 1972, it looks something like a set from Logan’s Run, only browner.

The museum is reasonably interesting, including a temporary exhibit of gorgeous prints by Audubon. Mostly the place focuses on the Mississippian peoples who lived in the area 1,000 years ago and more, and who, like a number of other peoples, left mysteriously before Europeans ever came to the Americas.

But the story of the museum itself is just as interesting if not more so, I think. For example, we were nearly 30 years too late to see any skeletons.

In the 1920s, a resident of these parts, one Don Dickson, started digging into Indian mounds on his family’s farm. He discovered skeletons. Lots of them. Maybe in the 19th century, such a find would have been unearthed and put into a traveling show, a seriously undignified outcome for human remains.

Dickson had a different idea, however, one more suited to his time, when Americans were more mobile than ever. He built a private museum around the skeletons in situ and people came to see them.

Not that dignified an outcome either, but at least the archaeological value of the site wasn’t completely destroyed. According to the museum, University of Chicago archaeologists investigated the area for years.

In 1945, Dickson sold the site to the state of Illinois, which later built the current building and still displayed the skeletons for decades. By the 1980s, the indignity of that arrangement was more widely understood, so in 1992 the state sealed off the remains beneath the building. Visitors today would not know about them unless they do further reading.

(Do people say the museum is haunted? That’s all it takes for a place to be considered haunted, after all.)

The museum also includes a lot of undeveloped land. A number of well-marked trails cross the land, so we took a walk.

Second-growth forest, I suspect, if this used to be farmland. A large section of land was fenced off with a tall mesh fence. Archaeological sites that wankers might try to plunder? Could be, though nothing about the fence explained its presence.

Dinosaurs of New York

Posted on August 23, 2020 by admin

Back in the days of paper letters and postcards, not every correspondence I started ended up in the mail. I have an entire file of letters and a few postcards that I didn’t finish and didn’t mail.

Usually that was for ordinary reasons, such as forgetting to complete it for months, by which time the news was stale. Only on rare occasions did I write a letter and think better of sending it because of its content, though I have a few insolent work memos of that kind.

I wrote a large postcard to a friend of mine in Illinois on August 27, 1983, while I was still in New York City. I think it got lost among the papers I had with me a few days later when I went to Nashville, and all these years later, I still have it.

Note the missing piece. I got as far as stamping the thing, but later removed it for re-use.

The printed text of the card says:

ALLOSAURUS (foreground) was a large, meateating dinosaur that lived during the Jurassic period of earth history, about 140 million years ago. This aggressive reptile, which preyed upon other dinosaurs, was about 30 feet long and probably weighed several tons when it was alive. Several individuals of CAMPTOSAURUS, a small, inoffensive, plant-eating dinosaur, are shown in the background.

Painting on Display
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
NEW YORK, U.S.A.

I wrote, in part:

Dear R—

I have come to New York to learn such oddities as “August is Bondage Month,” which a simple advertisement in the window of the Pink Pussycat Boutique told me. [Remarkably, the shop is still there; give the people what they want, I guess.]

Since the long line to pass through customs at JFK [returning from Europe], I’ve shuffled first to the P’s house in New Rochelle, then S’s house in Stamford, Conn. Since last Friday (the 19th), I have been at D’s apartment while she is on the Jersey shore with her parents. This is a good arrangement. I’ve become acquainted with the Village and various other parts of the city.

This card, for instance, is an accurate portrait of Brooklyn, by the East River.

The National Museum of Denmark

Posted on June 21, 2020 by admin

Another example of somewhere I visited but don’t really remember: The National Museum of Denmark (Nationalmuseet). You could say that’s because I was there 37 years ago this month, which is a long time ago, but at roughly the same time, I visited the Carlsburg Brewery and Tivoli — the same day in the case of Tivoli — and I remember those fairly well.

Memory’s a slippery character. Here’s what I wrote at the time.

June 18, 1983

Walked [after breakfast] to the National Museum and spent a lot of time in the early Danish collections, a fine assortment of artifacts from pre-farmers (4000 BC) to the Vikings. They had a lot — tools, weapons, pots, clothes, ornaments, more. I noticed that much of the collection — seemed like nearly all of it — survived because it was buried with people.

Then I spent a long time ogling the coin collection, mostly the Roman ones. The museum had at least one example of every emperor and plenty of usurpers and others. I didn’t take as much time in the rest of the museum, but walked through. It is vast. Rooms and rooms and rooms of exhibits.

I left to eat lunch at a Chinese place, spring rolls with sauce and a heap of rice. After lunch I bought chocolate: Toblerone and Ritter Sport.

Those sound like ordinary chocolate purchases, and maybe they are now, but in those days Toblerone wasn’t available in every shop from here to East Jesus and my traveling companions and I had never heard of Ritter Sport. It was an important discovery for us that summer, somewhere in Germany a few weeks earlier. If you’re walking around all day, chocolate’s a good thing to have. Even better, it’s good to snack on high-quality choco like Ritter Sport. Best of all, it’s chocolate that I’ve enjoyed ever since it became available in the U.S. sometime in the late ’80s.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Museums