For the next addition to its permanent exhibitions, Chicago’s Field Museum is looking far to the East.
The Cyrus Tang Hall of China, showcasing some 350 artifacts from the museum’s 40,000-item collection, will open next June in a gallery on the second floor, museum officials announced Tuesday morning.
“This exhibition has been years in the making,” said museum president Richard Lariviere, speaking in an area that will be a reflective garden, with windows facing Lake Michigan, when the China hall opens.
Treating the world’s most populous country from prehistoric times to the present, the exhibit will represent a significant addition to the natural history museum’s coverage of the world’s cultures. Currently the museum’s public displays about people and culture concentrate on those of the Americas and the South Pacific, with galleries also devoted to Africa and to ancient Egypt.
“China is one of the most important countries in human history, and it’s growing in importance in terms of contemporary matters,” Lariviere said.
To the immediate west of the garden area will be 6,000 square feet to display the artifacts, a space currently being divided into five smaller galleries. The area previously was used primarily for storage for the anthropology department and for the adjacent botany hall, officials said.
The Tang Hall, named after donor and former Chicago businessman Cyrus Tang, will showcase jades, bronzes, ceramics, textiles, burial objects and even a puppet theater. Multimedia presentations will tell the stories of the people who created and used the objects.
Many of the Chinese objects in the Field’s storerooms were collected by influential curator Berthold Laufer in the early 20th century. “He did an especially great job collecting things used by everyday people, so they’re not all high-status objects,” said Gary Feinman, curator of anthropology.
The Field’s previous display of Chinese artifacts, mostly objects in cases covering about 2,000 square feet, was taken down in summer of 2013 to begin preparations for the new hall.
The coming exhibition’s space is raw now, being fitted for infrastructure, but Field renderings show dark background colors, lighting designed to enhance the mostly smaller objects that will be on display, and decorative elements taken from Chinese culture.
The idea is to use “beautiful materials that evoke the subject but are not over the top,” said Jaap Hoogstraten, director of exhibitions.
The door to the hall will be flanked by the museum’s 13th century Chinese stone lions, familiar to long-time museumgoers. And the new exhibition will be the first to showcase a Field innovation in signage: a touch-screen “digital reading rail” — a sort of enlarged and elongated iPad — that will let visitors delve deeper into the stories of the objects in front of them.
To enter the China exhibition visitors will have to purchase Discovery or All-Access Passes, which cost more than general admission.
The museum’s last major addition to what are called permanent exhibitions — those designed to remain part of the museum’s offerings for the foreseeable future — came in November 2011, when it opened “Restoring Earth,” a tribute to museum scientists’ conservation work.
Cyrus Tang emigrated to the U.S. from China in 1950, according to the website for his foundations. He founded Tang Industries in the Chicago area (where he attended Illinois Institute of Technology and later served on its board). Products of the holding company, now headquartered in Las Vegas, include industrial metal, pharmaceuticals and office furniture.
Tang’s son Michael is a long-time Field board member, and the Cyrus Chung Ying Tang Foundation has given at least three major gifts to the museum. The museum’s 2007 and 2008 Annual Reports listed the foundation as a donor of between $2 million and $5 million, and the 2012 report listed a $5 million-plus gift from the foundation.
The Cyrus Chung Ying Tang Foundation website says it has supported the Field for general expenses, in anthropological and biological research in China, and for the Tang Hall.
Tang’s foundations also funded the Tang Center for Herbal Medicine Research at the University of Chicago.