DePaul University Faculty and Students Begin Their Fight for the DePaul Art Museum
However, it must be sustained, increased and include the Lincoln Park community and other Chicago, Illinois, out-of-state and international universities
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DePaul University’s faculty and students are not happy about the administration’s decision to close the DePaul Art Museum. That unhappiness has been funneled into action.
On Monday of this week, the Chicago Sun-Times published an article by Ambar Colón that included a link to an open letter signed by DePaul full-time and part-time faculty, students, and alumni. The letter ends with a warning of misplaced “prioritization” and the larger issue of the closing:
Even given the university’s current budgetary shortfall and consequent need for belt-tightening at various levels, the plan to repurpose the DPAM building (without specific details) appears to us short-sighted, wrong-headed, and grounded in some deeply disappointing principles of prioritization. With the headwinds we are facing in higher education today and the forces that push us toward lowering academic standards, toward introducing education-antagonistic tools and practices, toward turning the university into a professional school, this is the very moment to be encouraging our students to see the enormous human value of the arts, not turning our collective back on them.
Colón mentions the letter is planned to be presented to DePaul’s administration that includes President Robert L. Manuel, Provost Salma Ghanem and Executive Vice President Sherri Sidler. While the letter was directed to DePaul faculty, students and alumni, Colón revealed that School of the Art Institute (SAIC) librarians, Old Dominion University’s Barry Art Museum’s curator and the Museum of Contemporary Art’s collections manager have also signed.
One of the open letter’s organizers, philosophy professor Sean Kirkland, told Colón the letter’s ultimate aim is “to generate some kind of public outcry about the closure and see if we could reverse the administration’s decision.” The only way that can happen is for the open letter to reach more people, universities and arts communities and for the resistance to occur on a sustained basis.
I also know as the mother to a high school sophomore and visual artist preparing to apply to college in two years, I will discourage her from applying to DePaul if the DePaul Art Museum closes. Closing the DePaul Art Museum also does not work in DePaul’s favor, since it has had a significant drop in enrollment, significantly from international students. DePaul is destroying itself and complicit to Dump’s destruction of art and the United States.
I signed the letter Wednesday morning though I no longer teach part-time for DePaul. Two years ago I chose to leave after part-time teaching at the institution for 22 years (my valid reasons for leaving are many).
As a literary artist, a beginning fine art photographer, the mother to a teenage visual artist at Senn Arts in Chicago and professional writing tutor at Wilbur Wright College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago, I know firsthand the value of art, its importance and how it impacts and shapes learning along with independent and critical thinking.
I also know as the mother to a high school sophomore and visual artist preparing to apply to college in two years, I will discourage her from applying to DePaul if the DePaul Art Museum closes. Closing the DePaul Art Museum also does not work in DePaul’s favor, since it has had a significant drop in enrollment, significantly from international students. DePaul is destroying itself and complicit to Dump’s destruction of art and the United States.
Along with its art and art history program, DePaul also includes a film and theater program. One of the theater program’s alumni is the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Moonlight Tarell Alvin McCraney who adapted the film from his play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. He adapted his screenplay with the film’s Oscar-winning Barry Jenkins. McCraney is also a member of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater.
DePaul is not looking at its past or thinking forward. With all its academic credentials, it is failing in creative and critical thinking in its pursuit of money; while the DePaul Art Museum closes, DePaul is still going ahead with financing a practice venue for its student athlete—sports is where a healthy portion of university revenue comes (often at the expense of its student athletes).
The open letter’s introduction included this sentence: “Leaving aside the Orwellian invitation to ‘re-imagine’ the arts by closing the building that houses them, it seems to us that those making the decision must not be fully aware of the multifaceted and widespread value that the DePaul Art Museum (DPAM) has for our academic community.”
As I mentioned in my Tuesday article, the DePaul Art Museum brings a lot of marginalized artists and unrepresented voices to its exhibitions and collections. It is also open to the Lincoln Park community, the Chicago neighborhood where DePaul resides, and the public at large. More than DePaul’s own community will lose out when it closes.
Art museum closings also happen more frequently than we would like. According to National Public Radio (NPR) during the height of coronavirus and the subsequent lockdown, many small museums like DePaul’s struggle to remain open because of a small or no endowment and lack of government funds.
In NPR’s March 29, 2021 article “‘Once A Museum Closes, It’s Closed Forever’: The Struggle To Keep Art Alive Right Now,” the author Nina Kravinsky had interviewed the former President and CEO of American Alliance of Museums, Laura Lott who is now the Executive Director of the National Art Education Association (NAEA). Lott told Kravinsky, "Unlike a restaurant or a shop, which we would also hate to lose, but would, when economic times return ... probably come back in some form, once a museum closes, it's closed forever, generally."
Plus closing an art museum or any museum is not easy. The process of shuttering any museum becomes bureaucratic and complex. According to the Observer’s article “What Happens to the Art When a Museum Closes” by Daniel Grant:
The board of directors needs to take a formal vote to dissolve the institution and then devise a plan for transferring assets—the building, furniture and equipment, the collection—to one or more other nonprofit institutions (federal law requires a tax-exempt charitable nonprofit that is dissolving “to distribute its remaining assets only to another tax-exempt organization”) while paying off any remaining debts, perhaps with those very assets. That plan is filed with the office of the attorney general of the particular state; there usually is a division of nonprofit organizations and public charities in that office that looks over the submitted documents to ensure that no breach of fiduciary duties or other instances of fraud were committed by board members. Once approved, the actual dissolution begins.
Articles of clothing in the collection of the Powers Museum were transferred to the Joplin Mining Museum, while furniture went to a nonprofit in Joplin that restores old houses. An entranceway counter was given to the Harry S. Truman Birthplace Historic Site in Lamar, Missouri. The museum’s display cases were donated to Joplin’s Freedom of Flight Museum, while bookshelves went to the Neosho Newton County Library in Missouri, and photographs and newspaper clippings went to the library in Carthage. The museum building itself was donated to the Carthage public schools, which repurposed it as an alternative school for students with learning challenges. A small amount of money remained in the bank, which was turned over to other nonprofits: a Civil War-era house ($15,000) that needed to fix its roof and a community foundation for scholarships ($25,000). “There also was a piano,” Stull said. “I sold it.”
In some cases, an entire collection is transferred to another institution that agrees to display or dispose of these objects in some way. The Philadelphia History Museum turned over its 130,000 artifacts of city history to Drexel University, while the 2,000-piece collection of arms and armor of the Higgins Armory went directly to the nearby Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, which closed in 2014, sent its 19,000-plus artworks to the National Gallery of Art and twenty-one other art institutions in the Washington, D.C. area, and the Newseum sold its building to Johns Hopkins University for $372.5 million while its collection will remain in the hands of the museum’s founder and principal funder, The Freedom Forum, which plans to organize traveling exhibits.
. . . .
As part of any museum closure, the executive director and board members need to establish who owns the objects in a collection. In a for-profit institution, the founder likely is the owner and may do with items as he or she chooses. In a nonprofit museum, it is more likely that objects belong to the institution itself. There can be complications in this, for instance, if a donated object enters a museum collection with restrictions (such as the piece must be permanently displayed or never sold). An object with restrictions is not considered to be completely owned by the museum, and museum officials need to contact the donor if still alive or go to court if the donor is deceased to remove those restrictions before they can proceed with the transfer of the item to another institution.
Susana Smith Bautista, who became director of the Pasadena Art Museum in 2017 and began the process of permanently closing it the following year—her experience led her to write the 2021 book How to Close a Museum: A Practical Guide, published by Rowman & Littlefield—told Observer that she “scrambled to look for paperwork” indicating how and when pieces came into the museum’s collection. “For the artwork where we could either not find any documentation, or the documentation did not require us to return it to the artist/donor, we tried to think of museums that would most benefit from these works, and so we approached them with the offer.”
There may be limited opportunities for private buyers to purchase objects from a closing or closed museum’s collection, particularly if it is an institution that owes money and needs to sell items in order to square its debts. “If the museum owes money and looks to sell some or all of its collection, a buyer could call the executive director to ask about purchasing one or more items,” explained Jason DeJonker, a bankruptcy attorney at the law firm Bryan Cave’s Chicago office. However, the museum director would more likely hire an outside broker, such as a dealer or auction house, to sell objects than make one-off sales to private individuals, he added. The individuals may still be able to acquire sought-after pieces but in the competitive arena of an auction.
Finding a new home for everything in a collection following a museum closure is not always easy. The Peoria Historical Society in Arizona, for instance, dissolved in 2019 following years of internal disputes about how to govern the organization. The board of directors split and the two entities each sued the other for “ownership.” After several years in mediation and court appearances, the Maricopa County Superior Court ordered the dissolution of the organization, placing the collection with the City of Peoria. The city placed the historical society’s collection at the Arizona Science Center, largely because that was local and had storage space to house the numerous items.
Already the librarians at SAIC and the Barry Art Museum curator at Old Dominion University have signed the open letter. Along with outrage and resistance from the Lincoln Park community, the closure of the DePaul Art Museum also calls for outrage and resistance from other Illinois and U.S. colleges and universities.
Now SAIC’s administration, faculty, and students need to sign as well along with administrators and students from other Chicago and Illinois universities.
These colleges and universities include:
Columbia College Chicago, which already cut 11 degree programs—many art focused—last year; my daughter will not be allowed to apply to Columbia College Chicago either.
Chicago and Illinois community colleges must join to effort to save the DePaul Art Museum as well. Many community college students transfer to DePaul.
It would be wonderful of colleges and universities outside of Illinois and the United States signed the open letter as well and demonstrated support for the DePaul Art Museum. Please share today’s commentary widely on social media.
If you are an alumni of DePaul and haven’t signed the open letter yet, I encourage you to do so. I also encourage those with no connection to DePaul, Illinois and the United States to sign the open letter too.
As a former DePaul employee, I will tell you that DePaul does not like transparency. The more attention and action the DePaul Art Museum closure gets, the more the administration will have to pay attention and act. That is one reason why I chose to leave.
Another reason was when student journalists at DePaul’s student newspaper claimed that DePaul tossed print issues of its paper revealing its budget cuts two years ago.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has given DePaul an F for its speech-climate grade.
The DePaul Art Museum is just one university art museum, but it points to three bigger pictures: fascism’s hold on the United States and DePaul’s complicity to it and the prioritization of funding a “practice facility” for sports.
The arts and humanities continue to be attacked and eliminated because of “cost-cutting measures.” The arts and humanities fight a two front war against capitalism and fascism’s efforts to destroy them every day.
I’ve provided the link to the open letter again here. I hope you will sign and share.