Ledger art is part of a long tradition of Native people documenting their history on their own terms. Many Plains Native communities started chronicling events pictorially on materials like rocks and buffalo hides. Beginning in the mid-19th century, they used pages of ledger books obtained from settlers.

The home of Mahlon D. Ogden, located on the site of what is now the Newberry, shouldn’t have survived the Great Chicago Fire. Standing in the direct path of the Fire and made of wood, it seemed destined for oblivion.

Printed on birchbark, Potawatomi leader Simon Pokagon’s “Red Man’s Greeting” provided a counter-narrative to the celebration of “progress” at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago

Chicago Avant-Garde puts the spotlight on Chicago as a site of historic, boundary-pushing experimentation in art, literature, and dance. At the center of the exhibition are five women whose lives and careers embodied a uniquely Chicago style of avant-garde creativity: artist Gertrude Abercrombie, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, dancers Katherine Dunham and Ruth Page, and curator Katharine Kuh.