The largest gift in the history of the Art Institute of Chicago will fund the construction of an expansion to accommodate new permanent galleries. The $75 million gift comes from collectors Dr. Lin Lougheed and Aaron I. Fleischman, who have served on the museum’s board of trustees since 1980 and regularly lend works from their personal collection. “Lin and I are thrilled to lend our names to a new building that will create additional space for visitors to see more of the collections than they have ever seen before, and for the museum to tell a more complete story of modern and contemporary art (…)” Aaron I. Fleischman is pleased.
The new building will be located on the Art Institute campus and will overlook Millennium Park. The museum’s annex will house the museum’s 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art collections. The Barcelona-based architectural duo Barozi/Veiga will design the building. While the architectural project has yet to be revealed, it appears that the building is being modeled after the previous extension. Modern Wing built by Renzo Piano which was very well received by the public. The architects were constrained not to build higher than the historic building, which represents an architectural challenge, reveals The Architect’s NewspaperThe start date of the work has not been communicated.
The project to expand the modern and contemporary art galleries is part of a plan to redevelop the exhibition spaces launched in 2019 by the architecture firm Barozzi Veiga. It was James Rondeau, the museum’s president and director, who began the project when he arrived in 2016.
The Modern Wing, a new building of nearly 25,000 m2 created by the Italian architect, had increased the permanent exhibition spaces by 35% on the north wing of the museum. The museum had also reorganized its spaces with new galleries of Greek, Roman and Byzantine art in 2012 and galleries dedicated to medieval and Renaissance art, to collections of arms and armor for a total of 700 objects.
The Art Institute of Chicago is the second largest American art museum after the MET in New York. Founded in 1893, the museum, which covers over 100,000 m2, welcomes 1.5 million visitors each year. The large and very diverse collections include 300,000 works. The collections range from European painting and sculpture from the Middle Ages to modern art to architecture and design. The museum also has collections of African, American, Native American art, as well as ancient art, drawings and prints. The museum is known for its impressive collections of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings. Its rooms contain several famous paintings such as A Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886) by Seurat, RParis, rainy weather (1877) by Gustave Caillebotte, a selection of paintings from the series of Water Lilies (1900-1906) and Millstones (End of day, Autumn) (1890-91) by Monet.
