Welcome Back
Funded through the generosity of Jack and Marjorie Richmond, the Richmond Family Welcome Gallery is a fitting showcase for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s heritage and global impact. (Image by Michelle Hassel)
Walk into the Alice Campbell Alumni Center from any direction, and you can’t miss them: the dozens of interactive cases, tables, panels, and more that make up the U. of I.’s heritage museum, the Richmond Family Welcome Gallery.
Since its grand opening during Homecoming Week in 2018, the Welcome Gallery has served as a destination for returning alumni and other campus visitors, and a gateway from which prospective students and their families can begin to explore the university.
The Welcome Gallery features both short-term and long-term exhibits on more than 130 topics, highlighting Illinois’ history and traditions, the evolution of its student experience, and the achievements of its alumni and faculty over the past 150-plus years.
The Gallery’s exhibits include a massive, interactive campus map; oral histories of alumni and students from the 1870s to the present; a Story Booth where alumni can record memories of their own student days; a history of favorite campus bars, restaurants, and other student hangouts; and 14 Discovery Boxes—enormous cherrywood display cases that present stories on U. of I. history, sports, campus landmarks, music, and more, through a mixture of physical artifacts and digital content, ranging from photos and videos to specially made short films and interviews with alumni, faculty, and students.
To date, nearly 350 artifacts have been displayed in the Welcome Gallery’s exhibits, most of them on loan from the U. of I.’s colleges and departments or from alumni and students. Some of the highlights include a program from the university’s first Homecoming celebration, in 1910; a game-used basketball from the 1989 Final Four; the geneticist and molecular biologist Phillip Allen Sharp’s, PHD ’69 LAS, HON ’14, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; the racing wheelchair Jean Driscoll, ’91 LAS, MS ’93 AHS, used to win the 1990 Boston Marathon; and a pair of movie theater seats that film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, ’64 MEDIA, used on their popular television series.
The next time you’re on campus, make it a point to visit the Welcome Gallery and take a trip down Memory Lane!
If you have an exhibit idea, a photo to share, or an incredible artifact you’d be willing to loan or donate, please contact the Welcome Gallery’s curator and collections manager, Ryan A. Ross, at rross2@uillinois.edu.
