The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) has announced the largest naming gift in its history, a $75 million donation that will fund a new building to house the museum’s permanent collection of late 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art.
“Currently, only a fraction of our iconic collection is on view at any one time, and our vision is to increase the number of stories we can share with visitors,” James Rondeau, president and director of the AIC, said in a statement to Hyperallergic. In a press release, the museum called the donation “transformative.”
The gift comes from AIC Trustee Emeritus Aaron I. Fleischman and his husband, test-prep authority Lin Lougheed. Fleischman, a former high-power Washington attorney turned investor and art collector, was named an honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018, where he endowed a modern and contemporary art curatorial position.
The massive donation to the Downtown Chicago museum will go primarily to the new building, which will be named after the donors and designed by the architecture firm Barozzi Veiga.
Fleischman said in a statement that the new space will allow AIC “to tell a more complete story of modern and contemporary art” from what he called “one of the world’s great art collections.” The museum houses numerous iconic artworks from the 19th and 20th centuries, including Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” (1942), Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” (1930), Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884” (1884–86), and several paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe.
The AIC made headlines earlier this year after New York investigators accused the museum of ignoring evidence that a drawing in its collection, “Russian War Prisoner” by Egon Schiele, was looted by Nazis. The museum denied those claims.
Its affiliate art and design undergraduate and graduate school, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was the site of an encampment during the wave of Gaza solidarity protests across universities this spring. At least 68 students were arrested in a sweep of the institute’s garden. Protesters charged with violations for participating in the encampment had their charges dropped and the institution said it would not press charges against students.
