Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Shaw, who modeled it after Le Petit Trianon at Versailles. Displayed throughout
its four floors are surgical instruments, paintings, and sculpture depicting the
history of surgery and healing practices in Eastern and Western civilizations. The
exhibits are old-fashioned (no interactive computer displays here!) but that's part
of the museum's odd appeal.
You'll look at your doctor in a whole new way after viewing the trepanned
skulls excavated from an ancient tomb in Peru. The accompanying tools were
used to bore holes in patients' skulls, a horrific practice thought to release the
evil spirits causing their illnesses. (Some skulls show signs of new bone growth,
meaning that some lucky headache-sufferers actually survived this low-tech sur-
gery.) There are also battlefield amputation kits, a working iron-lung machine in
the polio exhibit, and oddities such as a stethoscope designed to be transported
inside a top hat. Other attractions include an apothecary shop and dentist's
office (ca. 1900), re-created in a historic street exhibit, and the hyperbolically
christened “Hall of Immortals,” a sculpture gallery depicting 12 historic figures
in medicine, from Hippocrates to Madame Curie.
1524 N. Lake Shore Dr. (between Burton Place and North Ave.).
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312/642-6502.
www.imss.org. Admission $6
adults, $3 seniors and students. Free admission Tues. Tues-Sat 10am-4pm; Sun 10am-4pm May-Sept. Bus: 151.
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Ages 3 & up.
Chicago
is home to an active community of collectors of so-called outsider art, a term
attached to a group of unknown, unconventional artists who do their own art-
work without any formal training or connection to the mainstream art world.
Often called folk or self-taught artists, their work is highly personal and idio-
syncratic, and they work in a range of media, from bottle caps to immense can-
vases. Intuit was founded in 1991 to bring attention to these artists through
exhibitions and educational lectures. Housed in the warehouse district north-
west of the Loop, with two galleries and a performance area, Intuit is slowly
gaining a higher profile on the city's art scene. The museum offers a regular lec-
ture series, and if you time your visit right, you might be here for one of the cen-
ter's tours of a private local art collection. Intuit doesn't offer special programs
for kids, but events like quilt sales featuring quilts of the African-American
improvised tradition, or graffiti art, should satisfy them.
756 N. Milwaukee Ave. (at Chicago and Ogden aves.).
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312/243-9088.
www.outsider.art.org. Free admis-
sion. Wed-Sat noon-5pm. Subway/El: Blue Line to Chicago. Bus: 56 or 66.
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
Ages 8 & up.
In 1889 a young woman
named Jane Addams bought an old mansion on Halsted Street that had been
built in 1856 as a “country home” but was now surrounded by the shanties of the
immigrant poor. Here Addams and her co-worker, Ellen Gates Starr, launched
the American settlement-house movement with the establishment of Hull House,
an institution that endured on this site in Chicago until 1963. (It continues today
as a decentralized social-service agency known as Hull House Association.)
Orphans found a home here, and immigrants received health care, job training,
and English lessons. In 1963 all but two of the settlement's 13 buildings, along
with the entire residential neighborhood in its immediate vicinity, were demol-
ished to make room for the new University of Illinois at Chicago campus, which
now owns the museum buildings. Of the original settlement, what remains today
are the Hull-House Museum (the mansion itself ) and the residents' dining hall,
snuggled among the ultramodern, poured-concrete buildings of the university
campus. Inside are the original furnishings, Jane Addams's office, and numerous
settlement maps and photographs. Rotating exhibits re-create the history of the
