Bison sculptures stop at Chicago's Field Museum on way to Smithsonian in D.C.
Three larger-than-life bronze bison statues made a stop at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History on Monday, and they won't be around long.
The statues were set to go on display outside the Field Museum at 9 a.m. Monday. They will remain on display until 5 p.m. They will be back on display at 9 a.m. Tuesday, but only for an hour, as they will leave at 10 a.m. Tuesday.
An event celebrating the arrival of the statues was postponed Monday.
The statues are on their way to the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The museum in the Nation's Capital is hosting a new exhibition, "Bison: Standing Strong," which was created to commemorate America's national mammal for the 250th anniversary of the country.
The bison statues are now in the middle of a cross-country migration. They started in Colorado and stopped at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and outside the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History in Iowa City, before coming to Chicago and the Field Museum.
Ultimately, they will find their way to the National Mall.
On Monday and Tuesday, Smithsonian experts will be on hand at the Field Museum to talk about bison history, science, and conservation, and the D.C. exhibit.
Anyone who does miss the bison statues can still see bison at the Field Museum. There are taxidermy bison specimens in the Field Museum's nature dioramas, as there have been for more than a century.
The Field Museum on Monday is also hosting a special bison-related PlayLab event for children ages 2 to 6. The PlayLab staff will host a story time featuring books inspired by bison, along with a coloring craft event and a touch-and-feel experience with bison pelts. This event will be held from 10:30 a.m. to noon Monday.
In the Chicago area, there are also live bison at the Brookfield Zoo, and a pair of bronze bison in Humboldt Park created by artist Edward Kemeys — the same who created the lions that flank the Art Institute of Chicago.
Kemeys created the models for the bison sculptures for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, but the ones in Humboldt Park are not the ones that were at the World's Fair. The World's Fair sculptures were plaster, while the ones in Humboldt Park were cast in bronze later, in 1911, on a smaller scale.
