The DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, founded in 1985 and part of DePaul University, will close at the end of its current fiscal year, on June 31. The school, which faces considerable financial challenges, announced the closure in an announcement to the community Thursday morning.
In December, the school laid off 114 out of 1,493 staffers, a greater than 7 percent cut, due to what it called a significant drop in international enrollment, according to WTTW News, which noted that the school had sought to cut some $27.4 million in spending. A report published this month by progressive think tank New America revealed that more than three dozen universities, including DePaul, had steered lower-income students to take out “hefty student loans while offering big tuition breaks to students from wealthier families,” reported a local Fox affiliate. Founded in 1898, the private school was established by the Vincentian order and offers over 300 degree-granting programs.
Other universities have come under fire from the public for decisions to shutter their museums or sell off parts of their collections in response to fiscal challenges, including, in recent years, Indiana’s Valparaiso University and Pennsylvania’s Albright College.
“It’s a huge loss to have this go,” said a source from the local museum community who asked not to be named. “It has come to be viewed as a surprisingly important museum in the ecosystem. It is small and willing to do things other museums and even other university museums are not so readily able to do.”
Sited in the city’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, the museum resides in a building opened in 2011 and designed by Antunovich Associates. It boasts a collection of some 4,000 objects, with a focus on international modern and contemporary art, which it began amassing in 1972. It boasts strong holdings of artists from the Windy City’s Monster Roster and the Chicago Imagists, including Roger Brown and Christina Ramberg, as well as many other Chicago artists, from Candida Alvarez to Dawoud Bey to Chris Ware.
The earliest work in the collection is a 16th-century painting of the Madonna and Child, though the holdings date primarily to the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The collection includes work from North America, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Per the institution’s website, many of the works are politically inflected, “grounding the collection in the university’s mission of social justice.” The museum’s Latinx Initiative, announced in 2020, aims to foster that community’s representation and participation and build on an existing collection including works by artists such as Lola Álvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide, Angel Otero, and Diego Rivera.
It is as yet unclear what will become of the collection, though the school’s announcement does not indicate it will be sold, saying, “In the coming weeks, we will convene a discussion with our university community to explore how the museum building and its collections can continue to serve as assets to DePaul, elevating our academic prominence and supporting the recruitment, training and development of current and future students.”
The museum is led by director Laura-Caroline de Lara, who has worked at the museum since 2016 and been director since January 2022. Until she moved to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in January, Ionit Behar was curator, a job she occupied since 2023 after serving as assistant curator and associate curator starting in 2020.
The institution’s website archives exhibitions stretching as far back as 1997. Opening March 5 are its final shows, devoted to artist Barbara Nessim, her first in Chicago, and Alice Tippit, a Chicago-based painter who is having her first museum solo. Both are curated by Behar.
