2018

On December 4, 2017, the Chicago Cultural Center unveiled a new mural titled "Rushmore." It was commissioned for $1 dollar and created by Chicago’s own contemporary art icon, artist Kerry James Marshall. The mural was a part of Chicago’s Year of Public Art, a year-long initiative that spearheaded multiple commissions for new public art in each of the City’s 50 wards. The mural celebrates 20 Chicago women who changed the artistic and cultural landscape of the city. Located on the western façade of the center, the 132-foot mural turns what was once bare limestone into a testament to some of the city’s most influential women who shaped its culture, including Joan Gray, Lois Weisburg, Jackie Taylor and Oprah Winfrey. "They are really the backbone, the spine, the spirit, the heart. They are really what it means to make culture in Chicago," the artist said at the mural’s unveiling. Mayor Rahm Emanuel described the mural as "a tremendous gift for the city," from "one of the most renowned artists in the world today. "This piece is going to capture, I think, the imagination not only of the city but the country and put Chicago in its rightful place as a city of public art." The artist is internationally renowned, with his work fetching ever higher prices in the global art market. Here at home, Marshall’s Still Life with Wedding Portrait sold for $5.04 Million during the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s Benefit Art Auction last month. The painting depicted abolitionist Harriet Tubman at her wedding. Marshall described the $1 commision fee for the mural as an act of "civic obligation" (the mural was funded by Murals of Acceptance, a not-for-profit whose goal is to bring art to all peoples in a free, public setting.) He also reminisced that the project is a very personal return to his roots, because his first exhibition was held at the Chicago Cultural Center.

At the top of the stairway on the Randolph Street side of the Chicago Cultural Center is the 45-foot by 50-foot Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) Rotunda. The ceiling is embossed with plaster carvings of swords, shields, helmets, and flags. This ornamental heraldry serves to remind viewers of the loss that comes with war. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) was a fraternal organization composed of veterans of the Union Army (United States Army), Union Navy (U.S. Navy), Marines and the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service who served in the American Civil War. Founded in 1866 in Decatur, Illinois, and growing to include hundreds of posts (local community units) across the nation (predominately in the North, but also a few in the South and West), it was dissolved in 1956 at the death of its last member, Albert Woolson (1850–1956) of Duluth, Minnesota. Linking men through their experience of the war, the G.A.R. became among the first organized advocacy groups in American politics, supporting voting rights for black veterans, promoting patriotic education, helping to make Memorial Day a national holiday, lobbying the United States Congress to establish regular veterans' pensions, and supporting Republican political candidates. Its peak membership, at more than 490,000, was in 1890, a high point of various Civil War commemorative and monument dedication ceremonies. Of the 19 companies that competed for the commission in 1896, it was the Chicago firm of Healy & Millet that won the challenge of creating this interior. Decorating firms commonly worked closely with architects and contractors to determine a building’s interior finishes. Led by Louis J. Millet (1856-1923) and George L Healy (1856-1921), this firm’s reputation for innovation and experimentation with then traditional materials was well established and respected by many. As graduates of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris their taste ran to the contemporary French preference for graceful and elegant forms inspired by nature. It was architect Louis Sullivan who called Louis J. Millet "the best chorus master" for coordinating such schemes, which might include painting, stenciling, art glass, and decorative plasterwork. As Director of Architecture and Design at the School of the Art Institute until 1918, Millet especially had a lasting influence on the Arts and Crafts community in Chicago as he guided generations of many young men and women who pursued careers in decorative design. The stained-glass dome in shades of tan, beige, and ochre is now lighted electrically. It was originally illuminated by sunlight. It is held by cast-iron ribbing, manufactured by the Winslow Brothers of Chicago. A floor inset with glass blocks originally provided natural light from the dome to the first floor below. Relentless experiment and rapid innovation characterized the American decorative arts scene at the time this building was being constructed. Seeking new decorative tools of expression, Americans such as Healy & Millet introduced opalescent glass, ripple glass, and chipped jewels to create texture and color in their work. Often incorporating flowers and foliage in their designs, as in this case, their expressions in glass quickly became popular and the artists who created them gained international respect. The intricate Renaissance pattern selected for this space is a classic example of their abilities. The immense G.A.R. Memorial Hall is just beyond the Rotunda. It measures 53-feet long, 96-feet wide, and 33-feet high. Leased to the Grand Army Hall and Memorial Association between 1898 and 1948, it was a meeting place for members of the G.A.R. Today, the collection of Civil War artifacts once displayed there is now preserved at the Harold Washington Library Center. The hall is now is used for ceremonial and artistic purposes, including weddings. This room is a somber and richly decorated memorial to the soldiers of the Civil War. The sedate Vermont (Verdé) marble walls bear the names of 30 Civil War battles including: Shilo, Antietam, Gettysburg, Cedar Creek, Ft. Sumter. The coffered ceilings are encrusted with dragons, fruit, starts, and other designs. Adjacent to Memorial Hall is the Claudia Cassidy Theater, originally a flat-floored G.A.R. meeting room.

Preston Bradley Hall is a large, ornately patterned room of curving white Carrara marble, capped with an austere 38-foot-diameter Tiffany glass dome designed by artist J. A. Holzer. The Cultural Center states this to be the largest Tiffany dome in the world – and with 1,134 square feet of colorful mosaics, including 30,000 individual panes of glass, the boast seems valid. Completed in 1897, the dome was designed for the Chicago Public Library by Tiffany’s legendary "chief mosaicist" J. A. Holzer. When the Chicago Cultural Center acquired the gorgeously ornate building 1986, the center also inherited the masterpiece that graced the ceiling of the structure. Though the building was estimated to be worth $2,000,000, the dome alone is currently valued at around $35,000,000. Originally sunlit, the translucent dome portrays the 12 signs of the zodiac among fish scale-shaped pieces of glass embedded in ornate iron framing. In the 1930s, a protective outer dome was constructed, and while the new backlit appearance was lovely, many felt the dome lost much of its natural beauty.

Completed in 1897 as Chicago’s first central public library, the building was designed to impress and to prove that Chicago had grown into a sophisticated metropolis. The country’s top architects and craftsmen used the most sumptuous materials, such as rare imported marbles, polished brass, fine hardwoods, and mosaics of Favrile glass, mother-of-pearl and colored stone, to create an architectural showplace. Located on the south side of the building, the world’s largest stained glass Tiffany dome – 38 feet in diameter with some 30,000 pieces of glass – was restored to its original splendor in 2008. On the north side of the building is a 40-foot-diameter dome with some 50,000 pieces of glass in an intricate Renaissance pattern, designed by Healy & Millet. In 1991, the building was established as the Chicago Cultural Center by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, the nation's first and most comprehensive free municipal cultural venue. Every year, the Chicago Cultural Center presents hundreds of free international, national, regional and local artists, musicians and performers, providing a showcase where the public can enjoy and learn about the arts.

The Oriental Theatre is located at 24 West Randolph Street in the Loop area of downtown Chicago, Illinois. Opened in 1926 as a deluxe movie palace, today the Oriental is operated by Broadway In Chicago, a subsidiary of the Nederlander Organization. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as New Masonic Building and Oriental Theater. The Oriental opened in 1926 as one of many ornate movie palaces built in Chicago during the 1920s by the firm Rapp and Rapp. It was built on the same location as the former Iroquois Theatre (later the Colonial Theatre) site of a disastrous 1903 fire that claimed over 600 lives. Although the façade looks identical, the Oriental retained nothing from the building that once stood on the same site. The Oriental continued to be a vital part of Chicago's theater district into the 1960s, but patronage declined in the 1970s along with the fortunes of the Chicago Loop in general. Late in the decade, the theater survived by showing exploitation films. It closed in 1981 and was vacant for more than a decade. The Oriental is one of several houses now operating in Chicago's revitalized Loop Theater District. According to Richard Christiansen, the opening of the Oriental spurred on the restoration of other theaters in The Loop.