World’s fairs have served to educate the public in human accomplishments through science and the arts, have forged links between cultures, and have set in motion events that might never otherwise have taken place. After his visit to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Andrew Carnegie was not only inspired to establish Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the museum’s noteworthy cast collections, he also introduced the annual Carnegie International exhibition in 1896. If it were not for the 1933 Chicago fair, James McNeill Whistler’s iconic painting Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother, also known as Whistler’s Mother, would not have traveled to the Midwest and been the star work at the opening of the William Rockhill Nelson-Gallery of Art (now the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) in Kansas City, Missouri, in December 1933.
