Art Institute of Chicago

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    Art Institute of Chicago Receives $75 Million Gift

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    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.” More

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      Police Arrest Dozens in Protest at Art Institute of Chicago

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      The police forcibly dismantled a pro-Palestinian encampment at the Art Institute of Chicago on Saturday and arrested dozens of protesters, hours after demonstrators had gathered in a garden at the institute and set up tents.Some of the demonstrators were students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which is affiliated with the institute, the school said in a statement.The Chicago police said on social media that officers had removed the protesters at the school’s request. A Chicago Police spokesman said Sunday that 68 people had been arrested and charged with trespassing.The protesters set up the encampment in the North Garden, which is part of the Art Institute of Chicago museum, at about 11 a.m. on Saturday, the police said. While encampments at some other U.S. schools during the recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests have stood for days or even weeks before police action, in this case the police said that officers “immediately responded” to maintain the safety of the protesters and the public.The People’s Art Institute, the organizers of the protest, said on social media that the demonstrators’ demands included that the institute formally condemn Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, remove any programs that legitimize the “occupation of Palestine” and divest from any individuals or entities that support Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Photos that the group uploaded to social media showed a sign in the encampment that read “Hind’s Garden,” a reference to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed this year in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza..The school said that it had offered protesters an alternate venue and promised students that they would not face academic sanctions or charges if they relocated there.The statement added that some protesters “surrounded and shoved a security officer and stole their keys to the museum, blocked emergency exits and barricaded gates.”After about two hours of negotiations, the school asked officers to remove the protesters, the police said. Officers issued warnings and eventually removed and arrested protesters, the police said.Videos posted by the organizers showed police forcibly pulling demonstrators out of the human chain they had formed outside the garden while some of the protesters chanted, “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?” More

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      Investigators Say Chicago’s Art Institute Is Holding onto ‘Looted Art’

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      The museum asserts it is the rightful owner of an Egon Schiele drawing that New York investigators say in a new court filing was stolen by the Nazis.New York investigators trying to seize a drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago filed an exacting 160-page motion on Friday accusing the museum of blatantly ignoring evidence of an elaborate fraud undertaken to conceal that the artwork had been looted by the Nazis on the eve of World War II.While the court papers, filed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, did not accuse the museum of being party to the fraud, they said it had applied “willful blindness” to what the investigators said were clear indications that it was acquiring stolen property.The drawing, “Russian War Prisoner,” by Egon Schiele was purchased by the Art Institute in 1966. It is one of a number of works by Schiele that ended up in the hands of museums and collectors and have been sought by the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish cabaret entertainer from Vienna who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. The institute paid about $5,500 for the drawing, which has been valued by investigators today at $1.25 million.In a statement, the Art Institute said it had good title to the work by Schiele, an Austrian Expressionist, and would fight the district attorney’s attempt to seize it.“We have done extensive research on the provenance history of this work and are confident in our lawful ownership of the piece,” the museum said, adding: “If we had this work unlawfully, we would return it, but that is not the case here.”But the investigators said in their court filing that the institute’s “failure” to vet the work properly “undercuts any arguments that AIC were truly good-faith purchasers.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More