MUSEUM CAMPUS — The Field Museum announced Tuesday that it is starting construction on a new permanent exhibition of Chinese artifacts called the Cyrus Tang Hall of China that is scheduled to open June 24, 2015, in the southeast corner of the museum's second floor.
Culling its collection entirely from the museum's nearly 4,000 Chinese artifacts, most of which were collected in the early 1900s, the exhibit has been in development for two years, according to project manager Tom Skwerski.
The finished product "will be the largest anthropology-focused exhibit on China, its culture and its history in the U.S.," Skwerski said Tuesday at a media preview of the construction area.
The exhibition area was formerly used to store anthropological artifacts behind the scenes, Skwerski said. It will feature an "attractor" at the southernmost point, a 6,000-square-foot main exhibit area and will end next to the Hall of Plants with a garden-themed room.
Welcoming guests at the main entrance will be two longtime Field guests who have been out of the spotlight: a pair of guardian lion statues donated in the late 1930s by the Studebaker family that were on public display at the museum until the 1970s.
Most of the artifacts were collected in the early 1900s by Field Museum curator Berthold Laufer, who made two expeditions to China from 1908-1910 and in 1923.
Skwerski said that about a third of the artifacts in the Cyrus Tang Hall of China have been displayed at the Field previously in various other exhibits, but two-thirds have never been seen by the public.
Even for familiar pieces from the museum's collection, Skwerski said "the context, the story around how and why they're displayed, will be different," with an emphasis on China's cultural heritage and each artifact's place within that narrative.
With the opening of the new exhibition, the current display of 800 Tibetan artifacts at the museum will be renamed the Cyrus Tang Hall of China Tibetan Gallery.
The exhibition is named for Cyrus Tang, a Chinese-born American entrepreneur whose Cyrus Chung Ying Tang Foundation funds cultural exchanges between the U.S. and China.
Tickets to the exhibit after it opens next year will be included in the museum's Discovery and All-Access ticket packages.
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