Museum After Hours: Secrets and Specimens

About This Event

A ticketed evening session after the daytime crowds clear out, part of a fall after-hours series the Field Museum runs each September and October — a genuinely different way to see the collections than a normal weekend visit.

The museum itself grew directly out of Chicago hosting the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition — the massive six-month world's fair that drew 27 million visitors to the city. Businessman Marshall Field put up $1 million to help turn the fair's exhibits into a permanent institution, and it was incorporated that same September as the Columbian Museum of Chicago, opening to the public the following June inside the fair's old Palace of Fine Arts building. It wasn't renamed the Field Museum of Natural History until 1905, specifically to honor Marshall Field as its first major benefactor — the 'natural history' focus in the new name also shaped what the museum actually collects and displays today.

Worth knowing: this runs 6-9 PM, and pricing hasn't been published yet — check fieldmuseum.org closer to the date.