Despite its heft, dimensions, elegant design, and lavish color photography, Art Deco Chicago is not an exhibition catalogue, but instead “the companion volume” for a 2018–19 exhibition at the Chicago History Museum. Catalogues often struggle to encompass an entire exhibition within the confines of a book, but Art Deco Chicago far surpasses its related museum show in terms of both range and ambition. While the exhibition focused only on the streamlined period of art deco from the 1930s to the early 1950s, the book explores art deco's origins in European art and design movements at the end of the nineteenth century. The 1920s, a decade of luxurious and often unique art deco works, also figures prominently in the book along with the streamlined period.1In five essays, prominent scholars of Chicago lay the foundations for the 101 entries in the section that follows, titled “Key 101 Designs.” These entries, written by a range of curators, historians, and collectors, begin with Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens from 1914 and end with Schwinn's Phantom bicycle of 1950. Visual and textual equity is created among the key objects: the entry for the Hostess Twinkie's streamlined yellow sponge cake is as well researched and illustrated as the entry for the Chicago Board of Trade's setback skyscraper. Accounting for most of the book's more than four hundred pages, these individual entries create a stunning and revealing curated exhibition of art deco Chicago between its covers. Along with the principal essays, they attest to the high-quality research, documentation, and visual analysis carefully intertwined with overarching design, urban, social, and economic histories here.In the volume's opening essay, editor Robert Bruegmann confronts the complex methodological and historiographical questions posed by art deco. Spanning what he calls, in his brief introduction preceding that essay, “the entire visual universe of Chicago buildings and products” (n.p.), Art Deco Chicago surveys the work of designers who looked to the past and present while simultaneously yearning for the future. This book is also a clarion call for a revisionist history of modernism. As Bruegmann writes: “We need to challenge the traditional modernist narrative and push back against the way the term ‘modernism’ was appropriated by advocates of the European avant-garde in their campaign to write out of history the kind of moderate everyday modern design that is represented in this book” (2). He then takes to task certain upper-middle-class (and, I would add, white) architects, designers, curators, critics, and historians who “like to believe they are the guardians of this historical record. It allows them … a way to distinguish their own beliefs and tastes from those of the ordinary middle-class world that surrounds them” (5). The new narrative that Bruegmann proposes is a history of “mainstream modernism” told through art deco.In the essay that follows, Jonathan Mekinda argues persuasively for Chicago as the capital of a popular modernism that emerged during the interwar years, where retail merchants such as Marshall Field's, Montgomery Ward, and Sears, Roebuck, as well as manufacturers like Sunbeam and Motorola, played crucial roles. These commercial entities created and sustained the ecosystem for a popular modernism based in Chicago. From the center of the United States, these retailers and manufacturing companies designed, produced, promoted, and disseminated art deco products across the country, to city dwellers as well as to people in small towns and rural areas. In the next chapter, Teri J. Edelstein explores the influences on Chicago art deco as these were transmitted through exhibitions, publications, fashion, and travel, as well as through the work of visiting and émigré European designers. Although Edelstein traces the origins of art deco through the English Arts and Crafts movement, the Deutscher Werkbund, and the Viennese Secession, she concludes that the luxurious decorative applied arts exhibited at the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris exerted the most “profound influence” on the art deco created in Chicago for all social classes. In the essay that follows, Lisa D. Schrenk examines the importance of another fair, Chicago's own Century of Progress Exposition, in 1933–34. Given this fair's focus on science and technology, the organizers agreed that the exhibitions should feature modern design, but there was no consensus on exactly what “modernism” meant. As designed, the exposition architecture ranged from the 1920s art deco of Raymond Hood's Electrical Building to the streamlined Chrysler Pavilion designed by Holabird & Root to the International Style of George Fred Keck's Crystal House. As Schrenk astutely notes, economic constraints had a far more powerful impact on the shape of the fair than did any specific architectural allegiances. Given that the number of participants remained uncertain, the organizers settled on an asymmetrical plan that offered greater flexibility than the Beaux-Arts arrangement first proposed. Most of the designs for the fair's buildings also featured uniform materials and structural systems such as large panels of new but inexpensive materials like plywood, Masonite, and gypsum board attached to steel frames. The clean and planar façades that these generated called for simple types of ornamentation, with the designers favoring bold signage, dramatic illumination, and low-relief sculptural panels.The book's final essay, by Neil Harris, is a provocative consideration of the afterlife of art deco since the 1960s and 1970s. Publications and exhibitions of art deco objects from this time stimulated a revival dubbed, rather disparagingly, “Decomania,” and young gay men, often artists themselves, were among the earliest collectors. Art deco objects, especially mass-produced streamlined works, were plentiful, inexpensive, and camp. The shock and outrage such works provoked among the guardians of orthodox modernism further added to their appeal. As Harris notes, movements to save and restore art deco buildings in Chicago and other postindustrial cities grew out of resistance to modern urban renewal projects as well as the National Trust's promotion of grassroots preservation efforts. Local preservationist Lynn Abbie created the Chicago Art Deco Society in 1982, inspired by another Chicagoan, Barbara Capitman, who pioneered the preservation of art deco buildings in south Miami Beach. Invoking the 1973 destruction of the beloved Diana Court in the Michigan Square Building of 1928–30 by Holabird & Root in Chicago, Abbie and her fellow volunteers rallied public support for the preservation of art deco buildings.In addition to noting the efforts of preservationists Abbie and Capitman, the volume presents intriguing information about the work of a number of other women, including designers such as Anne Swainson, head of the Montgomery Ward design department from the 1930s through the 1950s, and interior decorator Marian H. Gheen, who wrote and lectured on interior design and also organized fellow women professionals. The accounts of these women are scattered throughout the book, however; there is no essay that weaves their lives and works into an overarching narrative about art deco and gender identity. Given that art deco's color and ornament are often stigmatized as what might be called a “girly” modernism (in contrast to the masculinity of the International Style, implicit in the discourse about its rationality, function, and structure), there is a missed opportunity here to explore modernism and gender. Ironically, the book's extensive use of color photographs, especially close-up views of objects and buildings, tends to reinforce the very stereotypes about art deco that the essays and the entries on key designs seek to contest. References to art deco's engineering innovations are made only in passing. The use of plans and sections to illustrate prominent examples like the 1929 Chicago Daily News Building, the first structure in the city built using air rights acquired from the railroad, and the inclusion of an essay by a historian of science and technology would have better supported these claims for art deco.The “Key 101 Designs” section includes entries on striking works by African Americans, such as illustrator Robert S. Pious, engineer Charles S. Duke, and architect Walter T. Bailey. Pious, who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, designed a poster for the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago that represented two young African Americans as ancient Egyptian royalty. Duke and Bailey, trained at the Universities of Wisconsin and Illinois, respectively, remodeled and expanded an African American storefront church into an impressive streamlined sanctuary, an unusual stylistic choice for religious architecture. Their works and personal histories signal the importance of Bronzeville, Chicago's rival to New York's Harlem as the Black Metropolis for African American artists, professionals, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs. Entries written by Lara Allison, Diane Gonzalez, and Kathleen Murphy Skolnik provide intriguing glimpses into the contributions made to art deco by these and other Black Chicagoans. Juxtaposed and told at greater length, these histories, as well as those of artist Fred Jones and designer Charles C. Dawson, might have enriched and complicated the history of art deco as the American mainstream modernism. Still, it is a tribute to the book's pathbreaking scholarship that it includes entries that raise questions about race, class, and gender and that suggest future research in these areas.Art Deco Chicago succeeds in proving that Chicago's importance for the history of architecture and design goes far beyond the traditional modernist narratives of the First Chicago School of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and the Second Chicago School of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and László Moholy-Nagy. Equally significant is the book's recovery of histories about making, distributing, and disseminating, accounts that are too often erased because scholars still privilege designing and theorizing. Art Deco Chicago is not only a foundational work for understanding mainstream modernism, but one that also underscores our need to expand the histories of modernism, whether of the avant-garde or the mainstream, by confronting issues of race, class, and gender identities.