At the Art Institute of Chicago, museum experts have the arduous task of cleaning an exhibit of 68 tiny rooms chronicling the history of interior design through the ages.
Those tiny rooms are boxes lined up behind dozens of windows set into the gallery walls. Inside, miniature furnishings reflect the design trends of a particular place and time period. Each room is created at a scale of 1:12, roughly the size of a shoebox.
"They are one of the most popular galleries in the museum and a point of pride for many Chicagoans," said department curator Kit Maxwell. "Many Chicagoans recall their first visit to the Art Institute as a child, peering into these miniature rooms."
The rooms were created by Narcissa Niblack Thorne, who hailed from one of Chicago's wealthiest families and traveled widely, collecting miniatures. Thorne assembled a group of skilled artisans in Chicago during the 1930s to create a series of miniature rooms, some of which are on display at the Art Institute. Thorne died at her residence in Chicago in 1966.
"She was adamant that they were not dollhouses, they were not something that a child could destroy, but they would educate and inform visitors on the principles of good taste and interior decoration," said Maxwell.
One room is set in London in the 1930s and depicts a living room with a cocktail set on the coffee table, a copy of Country Life magazine on the sofa and a card game on the table by an open window.
"This is one of my favorite rooms," Maxwell said. "I feel like I could live in this room for sure."
The rooms are cleaned at least twice a year. The department's primary art handler, Jonathan Worcester, is responsible for the preservation and display of the art pieces — everything from maintaining the storage rooms, coordinating with mount-makers to display objects in the galleries and prepping artwork to be repaired or cleaned.
Worcester and a co-worker clean all of the tiny decor in the rooms. He said cleaning each room can take anywhere from one to three hours. It mainly involves cleaning dust and soot, which is not only an aesthetic issue, but can also affect the preservation of the art pieces.
"The primary strategy is patience," said Worcester. "It's really just a matter of being extremely careful and diligent in how you handle the material; everything is a little different, and it's about care in how you process these things."
Worcester wheels around a plastic utility cart carrying an arsenal of tools for precise cleaning, including brushes, spatulas, tweezers and an air blower. He even has a miniature chandelier holder that allows him to carefully dust and analyze a chandelier for cleaning.
Worcester has a step-by-step process to make sure each room gets cleaned thoroughly. First, he unlocks the glass front of the case that encloses each room. Next, he dismantles the room, removing all the tiny furniture. Then, he'll clean the actual interior of the room. Finally, many of the rooms have ancillary rooms attached to the primary section, which Worcester accesses and cleans through the back of the gallery.
Throughout the process, Worcester references photographs of the rooms so he can place the objects back in the rooms exactly as they were before.
"As you can see, it can be a bit repetitious. You have to sort of get into a very specific frame of mind, where obviously you're doing something over and over again, but you're doing it with the utmost care," Worcester said. "So, typically I will sort of listen to an audiobook, you know, reach whatever meditative state is necessary."
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