The 1893 Columbia Expo in Columbia in the world to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, surprised everyone who has experienced it. A great white city comes from Chicago's flat landscape, buildings and buildings will all things from Classical Rome to Alpine Huts. The life-sized lake pattern of Columbus' fleet, Viking warships and Venetian style gondolas was launched on a sprawling engineering lake, including gondolas brought from Italy. George Ferris invented a majestic 20-storey tall wheel from rival Eiffel's Tower. The lights of Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse illuminate the night. Famous figures in history and mythology, mainly in plaster, appear to be wandering through the crowds of women known as “White Rabbits.”
The expo's plan began years ago with the concept ambitious to make a statement. There are nearly 700 acres of buildings with 200 buildings, all of which are designed to showcase Chicago as a top-notch city. But the plan is too grand: Chicago runs out of artists. Lorado Taft, a renowned sculptor and lecturer at the Chicago Art Institute, was tasked with creating statues and decorations for many buildings, and as the fair opened closer and closer, he realized that the artistic manpower available was not enough. Pragmatically, Daniel Burnham, the architect he asked for in charge, was unheard of at the time. Can he hire some female students to work on the committee? Burnham replied: “Hir anyone, even a white rabbit, if they can get the job done.” So Taft told his schoolgirl: “You might as well start calling yourself a white rabbit.”
The story of the group is recorded in the autobiography of Janet Scudder. Model my life. In it, she tells how, as a hungry wood carving, she couldn't join the union, and she heard that Taft's studio had a salary for a female sculptor. She ran over and he immediately worked on the decorative sculptures of the gardening building's facade. Once finished, it is a huge studio for Taft and his White Rabbits, who make sculptures at an impressive pace. He told them they would pay $5 for their daily work, $7.50 for Sunday, and then the prince. At the end of the first month, each envelope was filled with a $5 bill. According to Scudder, it all seemed like a dream.
As the exhibition preparation continues, studios in garden architecture become an attraction in their own right. Artists, politicians and investors stopped to admire the young woman in white coats, covered in stucco, sprinting up and down on scaffolding, and Taft's white rabbit's reputation grew. Lorado's sister and Zulime Taft, one of his students (also a white rabbit), are recorded before unfolding, and she may shake “forty-five governors.”
The group's missions include embellishing the pillars and doorways of important buildings and transporting them from other artists to a full-scale statue or fountain. The grandest of the many fountains on the lake created by Frederick Macmonnies is the work of the White Rabbit.
But White Rabbit is more than just a studio assistant. They also conceived and executed their own works. The Daniel Boone sculpture by Enid Yandell had two lives – at the fair, made of plaster, while copper, and later cast through the committee of the Louisville Historical Society. That statue, she was paid $1,500 (equivalent to about $50,000 today), is now located in Cherokee Park in the city.
Yandell went to Paris the year she was a White Rabbit to study with Auguste Rodin. She maintains a studio in the city and is often exhibited in salons. She is the second woman to accept the National Sculpture Society of New York. The white rabbit Bessie Potter Vonnoh and Janet Scudder were accepted soon after. Julia Bracken Wendt, who fled her home at the age of 13, was hired as a domestic servant by a woman who knew her talents and paid for her to take classes in Taft. By the age of 25, she was his assistant. As a white rabbit, Bracken Wendt received a key committee for the Illinois building. she Illinois welcomes the countryOriginally in plaster, later cast in bronze, it is now standing in the state's Capitol.
Vonnoh also received a large committee Art of anthropomorphismused in Illinois buildings. After the expo, she traveled to New York and Paris to study, showcase and ensure the committee. Her most famous works are Burnett Memorial Fountain In Central Park. She held a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Art Gallery in 1910 and became the first female sculptor to enter the National Academy of Design in 1921.
New York sculptor Mary Lawrence is another white rabbit who studied with Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Art Students League. Thanks to his suggestion, she was appointed to create a huge statue of Columbus, located at the entrance of the Executive Building. Critics and jealous competitors claimed that it must be St. Goenz’s work, but in his memoir, he asserted that Lawrence “modeled and executed it, and that the vitality and scope of the treatment she revealed was credited to her.” In 1895, she became the first female coach of the New York Art Students League. Helen Farnsworth Mears was 21 years old when he was commissioned Wisconsin's geniusa nine-foot sculpture kicked off her career. It was then executed in marble and now plays the Wisconsin Capitol.
No one knows exactly how many white rabbits there are, or how many female sculptures are there at the 1893 Fair. At the busy opening ceremony, maintaining employment records is obviously not a priority, and details are still scarce. We do know, Carol Brooks MacNeil (known for her little kid bronze), Ellen Rankin Copp (carved portraits of famous Chicago people), Margaret Gerow Young mother) and Jean Pond Mining Coben (who continued to carve until a week before his death at the age of 101) are also white rabbits.
Overall, the 1893 Expo in Colombia attracted 27 million visitors. One of them is Evelyn Longman, who was inspired to learn sculpture after hearing the news about the White Rabbit. She continued to contribute to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and it’s not hard to imagine Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Anna Hyatt Huntington being the main next-generation sculptors who moved around the same art world and they would know some of the White Rabbits and their works. In fact, it is hard to imagine the opposite.
Although the art and architecture of the World Columbia Fair were mostly destroyed, this was not the case with its strange cultural heritage. Ripples travel, sometimes unexpected. This lady’s architecture is one of the most outstanding gazebos, featuring women’s achievements in art, science, literature and music around the world, including the 58 x 12-foot 12-foot murals painted by Mary Cassatt (Modern womenmissing shortly after the fair) and sculptures by Edmonia Lewis. In 1973, eighty years after the White Rabbit and the Fair, young feminist artist Judy Chicago and some of her students found a copy of the woman's architectural catalog in a second-hand bookstore. They decided to name it the Californian Non-Profit Center for the Arts. According to the Los Angeles Times, until 1991, women's buildings in Los Angeles were “one of the centers of the feminist art movement”, which was a suitable fate.
