The Field Museum is hoping to change the way people perceive it.
The institution in the big wedding cake-building by the lakefront knows that people know it as a natural history museum, stuffed with dinosaur bones and mammal dioramas and all manner of cultural artifacts from peoples across time.
But what folks aren’t so clear on is the museum’s work as a contemporary research institution, one that employs 150 scientists, officials said.
So the Field, beginning Tuesday, is rebranding itself with more emphasis on the institution as a whole and on the science done therein, part of a momentous 125th anniversary year that is also seeing a makeover of the central Stanley Field Hall, including the displacement of prized fossil Sue the T. rex in favor of a gigantic titanosaur skeleton cast.
The new slogan at the center of this first branding makeover since 1999? “Earth. We’re on it.”
“One of the things I’ve really had at the top of my list was to convey to the public how important the science is that the Field Museum conducts,” said President and CEO Richard Lariviere, “and that the science is what informs the public displays. That it’s not just an entertainment venue.”
To that end, banners going up on either side of the massive Museum Campus edifice will display a bold new Field Museum logo that looks, in its most compact iteration, a little like it was stamped into place. The predominant color is kind of a rich, bright blue, and the look and logo will be a part of museum advertising going forward.
Even the period after “Field” in the compact logo has a purpose: to represent the tiny fraction of the museum’s artifact collection that is on display at any given time.
“The logo is what everybody thinks a brand is about, but we really want to convey that the world is facing some tough scientific questions and we’re here to help answer them,” Lariviere said.
On the building’s north side, the new logo banners will flank a massive print of the planet, while on the south they’ll surround signs touting some of the major exhibitions. The museum will still sell its special exhibitions, but beginning with the one on mummies in mid-March, the advertising will include the logo and branding campaign and make it all of a piece. The standard has been to advertise each special exhibition as its own entity.
“It’s repositioning us as a scientific institution,” said Stacy Dilling, the museum’s director of marketing, whose team worked with partner Leo Burnett Agency to develop the new branding. “I think it’s just being more boastful about the work we’re doing here.”
A new YouTube video spotlights the museum’s mission, using actual footage of museum scientists in the field. Included, Dilling said, are the Field’s efforts in the Calumet area, working on ecological restoration along Lake Michigan’s southern tip, and in Peru, helping to preserve the Amazon rainforest. A June exhibition on Antarctic dinosaurs will showcase fossils discovered by the museum’s own paleontologists.
And then there is the encyclopedic collection, becoming even more valuable as new scientific techniques allow it to be more comprehensively used, Lariviere said.
“It’s interesting to me to look back at the evolution of an institution like the Field,” he said. “We didn’t set out to be this enormous repository of the history of life on Earth. In 1893 we were a place where kids from the Midwest could see a zebra.
“One hundred twenty-five years later we have this really big moral responsibility to the world to preserve and enhance these fantastic collections,” which now approach “40 million specimens and artifacts that can never, ever be collected again,” he said.
“I love this ‘Earth. We’re on it.’ It’s energetic. It’s forward looking. It’s engaged and engaging.”
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @StevenKJohnson