Great Ideas of Humanity: One of a Series

September 21, 2023 – Ongoing

Chicago Cultural Center
78 E Washington St
Chicago, IL 60602

Featuring works that embrace the increasing globalization of our world and celebrate the resulting cross-pollination of ideas, philosophies, societies, and cultures. The exhibition is a visual response from a variety of artists on the idea of great design and creativity in history.

From 1950-1975, Chicago-based Container Corporation of America ran a campaign heralded as one of the best in advertising history, the Great Ideas of Western Man.

The world has changed since 1975, but great ideas are timeless. Our reprise, Great Ideas of Humanity, embraces the increasing globalization of our world and celebrates the resulting cross-pollination of ideas, philosophies, societies, and cultures.

Like the original series, a committee meets, creates a list of ''great ideas'' from a variety of thinkers, and commissions artists or designers to create a visual response. Also like the original series, the contemporary work does not advertise a product, but an ethos—of the Design Museum of Chicago, of the community, of Chicago in general—to make the world a better place through thoughtful design.

The work in this exhibition is organized into sections inspired by Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon, a two-volume work that categorized and indexed all 431 original writings in the Great Books of the Western World series that the original campaign was based on.