World's Fair Comes to Kansas City

Keller Frères, France (1881–1922). Pitcher, 1900. 

The history of world's fairs staggers across the country in architectural fragments.  Queens, NY's Flushing Meadows, the Seattle space needle, and the Sunsphere in World's Fair Park in Knoxville, Tennessee, (where I used to live and gazed upon the sphere every day), are a few remnants of this wide-ranging, romantic, imperialist, exciting 19th century idea.  One of my favorite historical novels is Erik Larson's brilliant Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, which depicts fictionalized events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.  If you haven't read it, I do recommend it!  I am anxious to read his latest book as well.
Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art opens the exhibition Inventing the Modern World:  Decorative Arts at the World's Fairs, 1851–1939, April 14.  The exhibition will feature 200 objects from multple world's fairs.  Those objects will be the cutting edge designs of their times.  The exhibition is co-curated by the Nelson-Atkins and the Carnegie Museum of Art.  

I can't wait!