MacMonnies’ Fountain as seen from the exposition’s Grand Plaza. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of James and Emily Carr Moore

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.”

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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........

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