THE NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM FOR CULTURE AND SOCIETY

As acquired from Meadville/Lombard Theological Seminary

I’m editing this quite a lot.  Persons wanting to know more about the Neubauer should use the link.

from the U of Chicago mag: 
Know no boundaries

BY CLAIRE ZULKEY |  DIALOGO—SPRING/SUMMER 2015

With a new director and 16,000 square feet of new space, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society has grown a lot this academic year—and with ten new research initiatives starting in July, it is prepared for more.

Architects' plan.

Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in Social Thought, was appointed the Neubauer Collegium’s Roman Family Director in October . . . “My interest is in bringing together ancient Greek traditions and ethics with contemporary thinking about psychoanalytic treatment and therapy,” Lear says. “I’m the guy who thinks of these as one thing rather than two.” . . .  One new project he is particularly eager about spans institutions as well as disciplines. Open Fields: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Very Idea of a Natural History, Lear says, involves “not just an anthropologist from here and a professor of art from there, but the curator of the Field Museum, tribal elders from around the country, and young practicing native artists. “When it comes to certain kinds of research projects, we refuse to recognize boundaries.”

I hope he maintains some rigor and scepticism if he’s going to deal with Native Americans because they are intensely political, which means smoke and mirrors.  But my connection to the Neubauer is not intellectual -- it’s the building, which was constructed specifically to be the Meadville/Lombard Theological Seminary -- for the ages.  They assumed that a Unitarian tradition, with all its love of ancient Greeks and psychoanalysis, would last for all time.    

M/L now has no campus, using the money from the sale of the several buildings it owned to lease space for the library, classrooms, and offices in a Chicago Loop skyscraper.  The cynical among us, including me, refer to it as a mail order seminary.  It has pretty much abandoned the Classical world or the psychoanalytic world.  But all that is irrelevant here.

This is the remodeling plan the architects provided.  It’s not quite fulfilled.  It appears that the library stacks are simply removed.  In fact, the interior was simply rebuilt.  I think this is the same as was done to Chicago Theological Seminary some years ago.

Resuming the original article:

The renovated building provides a new space for scholars from around the world to collaborate, establishing the Neubauer Collegium as a locus for global engagement: 1. The building houses multiple suites for visiting fellows to set up office with adjacent versatile areas for collaboration. 2. The seminar room features advanced e-collaboration and videoconferencing capabilities. 3. The reading room, which showcases the building’s original wood paneling, is intended for informal engagement and reflection. 4. The exhibition gallery presents historical and contemporary art, films, and performances. (Illustration courtesy Kliment Halsband Architects)

. . . [the Neubauer’s] new home, which officially opened April 20 at 5701 South Woodlawn Avenue . . .  is a work of adaptive reuse, maintaining the spirit of the former Meadville Lombard Theological School while updating it for 21st century needs. 

Alumni will have an advance opportunity to see the building and witness the Neubauer Collegium in action . . . during an Alumni Weekend UnCommon Core session on the project Past for Sale, where researchers from anthropology, art history, economics, law, and policy will discuss the illicit antiquities market and how to combat it.

Anthropologist Justin Richland and a team that includes Field Museum curator Alaka Wali and tribal leaders from the Hopi and Crow Nations explore the use and misuse of Native American material culture with Open Fields: Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Very Idea of a Natural History.

Most recently, workers installed a sparkling new copper canopy over the main entrance on 57th street. Like the Neubauer Collegium's logo, the canopy's design mirrors the architectural motif found throughout the building's stonework.

So what does all this mean to me personally?  I won’t address the content of the symposiums here.  In the past "Native American Material Culture" has had me by the throat.  I think high intellectuals don’t get it.  They keep trying to convert a political and survival issue into a moral issue.  THEIR morality, not that of the Indians.

Buildings I’ve loved and lost include, from the beginning, some humble structures: a barely post-homestead farmhouse on South Deer Creek near Roseburg, Oregon, where my beloved aunt and her family lived.  The farmhouse was demolished to make way for a modern house three times the size and ten times as convenient.  The house where I grew up in Portland, OR, was both my mother’s bridal dowry and her deathbed.  It's still there, maintained and upgraded by young professionals starting families.  What saved it was location: near downtown, easy commute.

Interior:  Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife

Museum of the Plains Indian

Interior: Starr Gallery, Fort Benton

Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, new major addition

The most painful change, quite relevant to “Open Fields”, was the conversion of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife to the Blackfeet Heritage Center.  It is next door to the Museum of the Plains Indian, which was built during WWII to encourage the Blackfeet to create materials for sale to tourists, parallel to the Appalachian quilting projects.  When Bob Scriver, to whom I was married in the Sixties, died of old age in 1999, his fourth wife cashed out his estate and left the country.  (Rumor suggests the amount she cleared was in the millions.)  The contents of the museum were full-mounts of all the Montana game animals, free-standing, not behind glass, and Bob’s own sculpture.  (Today the Scriver bronzes about Blackfeet are in Fort Benton, in a reproduction of a fur trade factor’s house that is in part the Starr Gallery.)  Bob’s museum never displayed NA artifacts -- though among Thad Scriver (who came in 1901) and his two sons, born there, they had a good collection.  The book cataloging them still circulates on the used book market.

When the politics became belligerent (at one point there was a fire in the museum), Bob produced a book that recorded everything in detail and then sold the material culture collection to the Edmonton Royal Alberta Provincial Museum.  The Blackfeet in Browning were so angry that they drove up and cursed Philip Stepney, the acquiring curator.  In a few years he died of cancer.  The Provincial Museum gave all sacred Bundles back to the tribes, except that Bob’s personal materials mysteriously disappeared, including the Bundle he and I acquired ceremonially and kept “alive” over the years.  When things cooled a bit, the tribe -- which had bought the Scriver museum building -- hired William Grant, architect, to design a remodel.  It now sells the sort of products that the Museum of the Plains Indian was meant to promote, including the wealth of fine paintings by local artists, many trained by AIAI. 

Down at the heart of the Scriver Museum is an old warehouse, built in maybe 1900, which Scriver personally disassembled, hauled to the new site, and hammered back together.  There is still no fire protection, but no old valuable material objects either.  The Museum of the Plains Indian was damaged by the 1964 flood and objects were destroyed, but experts say the displays were damaged more from a scientific point of view by a project that “renewed” and “cleaned” them.  By now I am more philosophical about all this.

The scale of the remodeling of the Meadville/Lombard building and the ideas it shelters is remarkable.  When I was enrolled, 1978-82, Mircea Eliade was housed there.  He was our most valuable object.  The academic world was still on the upswing.  Once an arson fire broke out late in the evening in the stacks and I rushed over with my key just in time to save the doors from the firemen’s ax.  Long story.  Mixed.  Like all stories told about structures over time.  Time IS a fire.  It consumes buildings and people alike.

Where M/L rents space