The donation from Aaron I. Fleischman and Lin Lougheed will support the museum’s new galleries.
The Art Institute of Chicago on Tuesday announced a gift of $75 million that will support new galleries for its collection of late-19th-century, modern and contemporary art.
The new building will bear the names of Aaron I. Fleischman and Lin Lougheed, the married couple whose donation is the largest individual naming gift in the museum’s history.
“This converts what has been an aspiration into a reality,” said James Rondeau, the president and director of the Art Institute.
“It is just about access to collections,” he continued. “Only about 16 percent of our modern and contemporary collection is on view.”
The museum has yet to announce the total cost of the building project, the square footage or a completion date, Rondeau said. While the addition will increase the Art Institute’s $115 million annual operating budget, Rondeau said the museum had prepared for that by building its endowment by $200 million over the past five years.
The new galleries are part of a project that began in 2019 to enhance existing spaces and explore how to make the most of the museum’s campus. The Art Institute is working with the architecture firm Barozzi Veiga.
Fleischman, formerly a prominent lawyer in Washington, began collecting in the mid-1980s and has been a trustee of the Art Institute for nearly 15 years. Lougheed received a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University, and he has specialized in international education.
“Touring the collections on view and in storage I came to believe that more of the museum’s extraordinary collection needed to be available to visitors and presented in world-class architecture,” Fleischman said in a statement, adding that he was excited “for the museum to tell a more complete story of modern and contemporary art.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
