About the program
Rebekah Coffman, curator of religion and community history, and Aries Gomez, Lilly collections fellow, will give a work-in-progress talk about inventorying, researching, reactivating, and improving access to the Chicago History Museum’s extensive architectural archive. Approached through the goal of recentering the archive on community use and underrepresented or erased histories, this work employs adaptive reuse, ethnic succession, and narrative contexts to create a more complete, representative, and equitable understanding of Chicago’s built environment.
The inventory is designed to lay the groundwork for future cataloging of currently uncataloged materials to more accurately reflect communities documented in the collections. It is conceived as a critical next step in assessing the strengths of the museum’s architectural holdings and identifying opportunities for deeper engagement and interpretation.
This work is ongoing and developing in anticipation of the forthcoming exhibition Everyday Sacred, which explores concepts of sacredness and the built environment through themes of ritual, memory, memorial, and belief.