How the White Rabbits of Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition Sculpted a Lasting Legacy

The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, timed and named to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, astonished all who experienced it. A great white city arose from the flat landscape of Chicago with halls and buildings that channeled everything from classical Rome to Alpine lodges. Bobbing on a vast engineered lake were life-sized models of Columbus’ fleet, Viking warships and a flotilla of Venetian-style gondolas, complete with gondoliers brought in from Italy. George Ferris invented a majestic 20-story-tall wheel to rival Eiffel’s tower. Electric lights, courtesy of Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, illuminated the night. And notable figures from history and mythology, fashioned and finished largely in plaster, seemed to stroll among the crowds—many of them sculpted by a group of women known as the “White Rabbits.”

The planning for the exposition began many years earlier, and the conceptions were ambitious, out to make a statement. There were 200 buildings spread across almost 700 acres, all designed to showcase Chicago as a first-rate city. But the plans proved too grand: Chicago ran out of artists. Lorado Taft, a prominent sculptor and instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago, was tasked with creating statues as well as ornamentation for many of the buildings, and as the opening of the fair drew nearer, he realized that the artistic manpower available wouldn’t be enough. Pragmatically, he asked the architect in charge, Daniel Burnham, for something unheard of at the time. Could he hire some of his women students to work on the commissions? “Hire anyone, even white rabbits, if they can get the work done,” Burnham replied. So Taft told his female students, “You might as well begin right now calling yourselves White Rabbits.”

The story of the group is best chronicled in the autobiography of Janet Scudder, Modeling My Life. In it, she tells how, as a hungry wood carver unable to join the union, she heard there were paying jobs for women sculptors at Taft’s studio. She ran over, and he put her to work immediately on ornamental sculptures for the façade of the Horticultural Building. When it was complete, it served as an immense studio for Taft and his White Rabbits, who were producing sculptures at an impressive pace. They would, he told them, be paid $5 for each day’s work and $7.50 on Sundays—then a princely sum. At the end of the first month, each was handed an envelope filled with $5 bills. According to Scudder, it all felt like a dream.

The studio in the Horticultural Building became an attraction in its own right as the exposition preparations continued. Artists, politicians and investors stopped by to admire the young women in their white coats, covered in plaster dust, scurrying up and down on scaffolding, and the fame of Taft’s White Rabbits grew. Zulime Taft, Lorado’s sister and one of his students—also a White Rabbit—recalled that she’d probably shaken “forty-five governors by the hand” before the opening of the fair.

The group’s tasks included embellishing the pillars and doorways of important buildings and turning models shipped in from other artists into full-scale statuary or fountains. The grandest of the many fountains installed on the lake, created by Frederick Macmonnies, was completed with work by the White Rabbits.

But the White Rabbits were more than studio assistants; they also conceived and executed works of their own. Enid Yandell’s sculpture of Daniel Boone had two lives—one at the fair, made of plaster, and a bronze that was later cast through a commission from the Louisville Historical Society. That statue, for which she was paid $1,500 (equivalent to about $50,000 today), now stands in the city’s Cherokee Park.

Yandell went to Paris the year after her stint as a White Rabbit to study with Auguste Rodin; she maintained a studio in the city and exhibited frequently in the Salons. She was the second woman admitted to New York’s National Sculpture Society. White Rabbits Bessie Potter Vonnoh and Janet Scudder were admitted shortly after. Julia Bracken Wendt, who ran away from home at age 13, was employed as a domestic servant by a woman who recognized her talent and paid for her to attend Taft’s classes. By age 25, she was his teaching assistant. As a White Rabbit, Bracken Wendt received an important commission for the Illinois Building. Her Illinois Welcoming the Nations, originally in plaster, was later cast in bronze and now stands in the state’s capitol building.

Vonnoh also received a major commission, Personification of Art, for the Illinois State Building. After the fair, she traveled to New York and Paris, studying, exhibiting and securing commissions. Her best-known work is the Burnett Memorial Fountain in Central Park. She had a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1910 and, in 1921, became the first woman sculptor admitted to the National Academy of Design.

New York sculptor Mary Lawrence, another White Rabbit, studied with Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the Art Students League. Thanks to his recommendation, she was commissioned to create a monumental statue of Columbus that stood at the entrance to the Administration Building. Critics and jealous rivals claimed it must have been the work of Saint-Gaudens himself, but in his memoirs, he asserted that Lawrence “modeled and executed it, and to her goes all the credit for the vitality and breadth of treatment which it revealed.” In 1895, she became the first woman instructor at New York’s Art Students League. Helen Farnsworth Mears was just 21 when she was commissioned to create Genius of Wisconsin, the nine-foot-tall sculpture that launched her career. It was subsequently executed in marble and now graces the Wisconsin Capitol.

No one knows exactly how many White Rabbits there were or how many careers for women sculptors started at the 1893 fair. In the busy run-up to the opening, keeping employment records clearly wasn’t a priority and details remain scarce. We do know that Carol Brooks MacNeil (known for her bronzes of small children), Ellen Rankin Copp (who sculpted portraits of prominent Chicagoans), Margaret Gerow (a talented sculptor and the model for Bessie Potter Vonnoh’s Young Mother) and Jean Pond Miner Coburn (who continued sculpting until a week before her death at age 101) were also White Rabbits.

In all, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 drew 27 million visitors. One of them, Evelyn Longman, was inspired to study sculpture after hearing about the White Rabbits. She went on to contribute work to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It’s not hard to imagine that Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Anna Hyatt Huntington, major next-generation sculptors who moved in the same artistic circles, would have known some of the White Rabbits and their work. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine the opposite.

Though the art and architecture of the World’s Columbian Exposition were mostly destroyed, as was intended, its curious cultural legacy was not. Ripples travel, sometimes in unexpected ways. One of the most prominent pavilions, the Woman’s Building, featured achievements by women in art, science, literature and music from around the world, including a massive 58-by-12-foot mural painted by Mary Cassatt (Modern Woman, which went missing soon after the fair) and sculptures by Edmonia Lewis. In 1973, eighty years after the White Rabbits and the exposition, a young feminist artist, Judy Chicago, and some of her students found a copy of the Woman’s Building catalog in a used bookstore. They decided to name their California non-profit arts center after it. Until 1991, the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles was, according to the LA Times, “one of the centers of the feminist art movement”—a fitting fate.