Not long ago I heard that William Beecher had died. For 28 years, starting in 1955, he was the director of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, the offbeat natural history museum in Lincoln Park. For a short time he was my boss.
Ed, a capable artist and a Moonie, was generally assigned the most mundane chores, like scraping tape residue off the exhibit cases. He always wore headphones when he worked, listening to recordings of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon as he performed his tasks with endless patience. I only saw him express frustration over this arrangement once, when we were assigned to dismantle an exhibit together. It was an ancient, faded thing, proudly predicting that man might one day visit the moon. Ed attacked the exhibit with a large ax. Afterward we stood on top of the debris and laughed.
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Carol had been the top artist before my arrival. She had to move over and share her spot with me, which I don’t think she was too happy about. We could have complemented each other, but mostly we were each other’s antithesis. I saw a design as a starting point, she was a meticulous follower of plans. The surface of her sculptures was always smooth; she would build the pieces up in thin layers, rarely taking anything away except to maintain that glassy finish. My work method was to add and subtract in equal measure, maintaining a rough painterly surface until the very end. The tension between us was held in check by a thin veneer of diplomacy.
Over the years the board of trustees developed great respect for Dr. Beecher, and funded most of his ideas, which he brought to fruition in the museum’s exhibits. The academy occupied an 1893 building in the park near the intersection of Clark and Armitage. Its second and third floors wrapped around a hollow core so they could benefit from the domed glass ceiling, but Dr. Beecher had many of the windows and the ceiling covered up so he could control the light in the exhibits. When I was hired, he’d finished exhibits in the lobby and on the second floor and had made a good start on the third. In the lobby the walls and the ceiling were painted to look like the sky on a warm spring day, full of a huge variety of birds in flight. The dome was painted like the night sky, complete with glow-in-the-dark constellations. The second floor featured murals including one of marsupial tigers and another of a band of Neanderthals crouched around a campfire, their faces painted with Day-Glo paint and lit with black light. Children loved it.
My first assignment was to make a life-size female figure holding a rattle–to fit into one of those 32-inch-high cases. I made the figure squatting and bent over. Dr. Beecher was pleased and ordered me to paint it. I used a high-intensity spotlight to mimic the light and shadows of the sun. Beecher kept insisting that I add more red to the flesh tones, and I obliged him until the figure was almost bright red. I realized that he wanted me to make this Native American literally a “redskin.”
Directly below this was the only case that didn’t contain life-size figures. It was a tiny Pueblo village with a few eight-inch adobe houses and a handful of three-inch villagers going about their chores, carrying baskets, making tortillas, tending children. The villagers were made from reconditioned plastic army men.
Two months before the reception, the artists were introduced to the new director. He had a wonderful warm handshake. He was a specialist in evolution, and very much of this world, as opposed to Dr. Beecher’s black-light netherworld.
