Chicago’s Field Museum has begun a new collecting initiative focusing on the impact of COVID-19 – and Evanstonians are a key part of the Pandemic Collection Project, as curators and artists.

When the new coronavirus began making headlines, museum staff realized they had no archives relating to the 1918 flu pandemic to shed light on the 2020 situation. Even though the museum was actively collecting back in 1918, when the city was hit hard by influenza, there was nothing for scholars to study.

Interestingly, the two eras are quite similar – and not just because of the twin pandemics.

Pandemic period parallels

The “Red Summer” of 1919 was one of violent racial unrest and protests throughout the country. The worst violence that year was in Chicago, beginning with the stoning and consequent drowning of a young black man who had ventured into a “white” swimming area on the South Side.

And it was also a time of rising pre-World War II antisemitism: In 1919, Hitler issued his first written comment on “the Jewish question,” calling for the removal of Jews from Germany.

The coronavirus pandemic period (2020 through 2022) has been rife with racial injustice and protests as well. Most demonstrations began in 2020, inspired by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. There was also an increase in antisemitic events nationwide in 2022.

The 2020 removal of three Christopher Columbus statues in Chicago, and others throughout the country, was in response to further public protests against the narrative of white supremacy and one-sided views of history.

New model for Field

The new, ongoing Field Museum collection is meant to be a record of expression and cultural responses – to the modern pandemic and to simultaneous movements for social justice – in art.

“This is new and innovative for the Field, which has been a traditional museum, one following an evolutionary model,” said sociocultural anthropologist Ana Croegaert, who is research director for the new collection’s curator team and a research affiliate for the Field.

The museum, Croegaert said, is using an expansive definition of art: dance, song, handmade objects, poems, photos. Already acquired are 180 objects, including digital files and textiles. The bulk are from Chicago, and often by Black makers, growing the museum’s diverse urban cultural anthropology collection. 

Croegaert said that since the 1990s the Field has pursued community-based partnerships in the Chicago area, in Amazonia (particularly in Bogotá, Colombia, where the museum is focusing on environmental conservation), in the Philippines and in Indigenous communities in North America.

So the pandemic collection will include objects from Amazonia, a few from the Philippines and materials from Native American communities as well.

Pop-up display promised for Evanston

Five general themes emerged as interviews were analyzed: home, marking time, care and medicine, the public square, and food. The Native portion focuses on wellbeing, medicine and mental health. 

Accompanying this collection and starting this fall will be a series of free “pop-up” displays around the Chicago area, with one promised for Evanston. The displays will be mostly projected, virtual rather than actual, and access will be open, with no fees. The collection is currently available for viewing on the museum website. 

As part of the new collection, the Field has officially accessioned artwork by Evanstonians Beth Adler and Ben Blount. 

During the pandemic isolation, Adler kept a daily journal of collaged art and created a series of paper sculptures. About the latter she said, ”Each month from the beginning of the pandemic until we had the vaccine, I constructed a  paper ‘house’ and lined it with news reports from magazines and newspapers from that month, chronicling the progress of the virus as it was reported. These ‘houses’ were little memorials to those that suffered and died from COVID.” 

Fitting into the theme of “home,” the Field acquired some of Adler’s “houses” and also a piece from her series Covid House Prints. Most of those prints featured a linoleum print of a crow.

“The crow came to represent COVID to me and being quarantined for weeks on end inspired this print,” said the artist. She donated her COVID journal to the collection. 

Adler attended the Art Institute and has been a graphic designer ever since. Her company, Herman Adler, specialized in nonprofit communications and textbook design. She closed her company in 2019 and then retired as creative director for a publishing development company in 2021.

Blount is also a graphic designer, with an MFA from Columbia College in Chicago. He moved with his family from Detroit to Evanston in 2014. He works as associate creative director at Razorfish Health, an advertising agency, where he is working on marketing the RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) vaccine.

Blount’s personal artwork consists primarily of posters done by letterpress, a relief printing process, and their often unusual installations. The Field acquired prints from his White Supremacy Is protest artwork that was installed both here in Evanston and on the exterior of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts in Minneapolis.

This work falls into the “public square” category. The Field also purchased his letterpress print Blursday from January 2021. 

Both artists said they were happy being isolated in their studios during the pandemic. They have contiguous studios with large storefront windows facing the street, so they were both able to see passersby, who often waved or gestured hello.

A third Evanstonian, Sarah Hinojosa, also participates in the museum’s pandemic collection. Her tree-mounted installation of poems and drawings is not considered an “artifact,” but part of the broader, community-based project.

Like Hinojosa’s Poetree, a hand stitching by artist-therapist Melissa Blount was not formally accessioned, but is included as part of the broader collection materials. The stitching by Blount, wife of Ben Blount, was inspired by a campaign that modified the sex-positive Cardi-B and Megan Thee Stallion song W.A.P. acronym to “What About Prosecuting” the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor in March 2020.

Croegaert is an Evanstonian too. She earned her doctorate in anthropology at Northwestern University, where she has taught. She also has taught at the University of New Orleans, Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and Loyola University Chicago. 

Croegaert is part of the Field’s core team creating the pandemic collection, which includes two more Evanstonians, Alaka Wali (co-lead for the project and the museum’s curator of North American anthropology) and Madeleine Tudor (senior environmental social scientist on the project and an applied urban anthropologist at the Field’s Keller Science Action Center).