By Ellen Shubart, Class of 2006
She comes to the interview right from working on the newest CAC exhibit, City in a Snow Globe. It’s a holiday installation, another way to help museum goers learn how design matters. CAC’s Director of Exhibitions Eve Fineman, Assoc. AIA, is not new to the organization; she has been here a bit over a year. But her influence on exhibits is being felt more tangibly through new and more frequent presentations in the CAC galleries.
City in a Snow Globe uses space not usually considered as galleries. The exhibit features five scale models of winter scenes in Chicago, designed by the Chicago firm UrbanLab. They suggest possible ways to enjoy the lakefront when it’s cold outside. In addition, there are more than two dozen globes from local designers and architecture firms featuring the theme of “embracing” Chicago winters.
The exhibition starts in what is formally named the Usher Lambe Rotating Gallery and Orientation Space, the area where tourists begin their tours. The exhibit allows them the fun of shaking and watching the snow globes in action.
Fineman has spent a good deal of time in the exhibition world. After completing architectural studies at St. Louis’s prestigious Washington University, she was first engaged with the Smithsonian Institution, then held a position in an architecture firm in Washington, D.C. The latter wasn’t the best situation. As the first and only woman in the firm, Eve found there was a conservative approach to architecture and a very strong glass ceiling.
Chicago drew her to graduate school at the School of the Art Institute, where she received an MFA in interior architecture and furniture design. “I had friends in Chicago,” she recalls. “They were lucky to live here. It was a good opportunity.” After graduation, she stayed.
Fineman went into the architecture/interior furniture-making business, did detailing, and worked with materiality. In addition, she proudly points to 20-years in education, teaching at the Art Institute, at Illinois Institute of Art, (full time for 12-13 years) and Columbia College (2-3 years) in the interior art department. Particularly in the last decade, she curated design exhibitions. Working solely with architecture, Eve missed the education piece, and vice versa.
But with curatorial work, she knits all the strands of her past careers together. “That’s the answer,” she says she thought when she saw the ad for the CAC position. “I didn’t know it until I saw it.” Now ensconced at CAC, she is optimistic about future exhibits. She expects to upgrade the building infrastructure for increased flexibility. And she is working to secure a collapsible system of displays, making it easier to put them up and take down. Finally, Eve hopes to use different areas of the overall space.
Although the Chicago Gallery was recently updated, some areas are due an update in 2023. The “Current Projects” area, for instance, will become the location for AIA design awards 2022. The People’s Choice Awards, sponsored by AIA Chicago, will be displayed on the wall behind the City Model.
Docents were instrumental in the initial selection of the People’s Choice Awards when they voted in the first round. Reader rails are being developed for the city model to encourage visitors to engage more with the buildings in front of them. Visitors will be able to see at least four “transformations,” changes over time for four sites. Viewing the lakefront will offer information about the 1933 World’s Fair, the transition to Miegs Field, and then to today’s music venue. A Youth Corner will highlight the Center’s educational programs, and the Neighborhood Gallery highlight the winners from the Come From Chicago competition.
CAC is working with the city, architects, and developers to create designs for the city’s vacant lots, hoping to create a pattern book with plans that are already permitted and meet Chicago’s stringent codes.
In the Drake Gallery upstairs, the upcoming exhibit will focus on mass timber construction – “not your grandfather’s lumber,” Fineman says excitedly. “This will upend people’s ideas about building. It’s about old-growth vs. growing wood and ethically managed forests.” She is co-curating that exhibit with Antony Wood (pardon the pun, unintended) from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. The exhibit is sponsored by the Softwood Lumber Board (SLB). Fineman points to two timber projects in the city; one is on Southport and the other, T3, proposed for Goose Island by Hines Development.
As the only person in the Exhibits Department, Fineman is a whirlwind. She is more than ready to take on CAC’s mission of moving people toward discussion, education, and connection to the built environment, especially the city’s neighborhoods. With hopes for future pop-up and temporary exhibits, Eve is making it happen
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