The DePaul Art Musuem has officially closed to the public, but the collections will remain with the institution, according to a university spokesperson.
Months ago, DePaul University announced the museum would cease all operations on June 30. Days later, university staff, faculty, students, alumni and notable Chicago arts leaders added their names to a letter of opposition to the closure.
But DePaul is going through with the closure, citing its “responsibility to ensure long-term financial sustainability.” The DePaul Art Museum announcement came two months after the university laid off 114 full-time and part-time staff. Administrators referenced financial troubles due to a significant drop in international graduate student enrollment, increased demand for financial aid and the rising costs of benefits.
The university’s provost later announced that the university will “maintain and steward the art collection as part of our academic and research offerings.” A spokesperson confirmed that DePaul has no plans to sell or tear down the building at 935 W. Fullerton Ave. on the university’s Lincoln Park campus.
Museum director Laura-Caroline de Lara will remain on staff to help the university manage and care for the collections, which are stored in the museum building. The nearly 4,000 pieces of the collection can be browsed online. De Lara became director in January of 2022. “I know it like the back of my hand,” de Lara told a reporter. “I’m really glad to be able to care for the collection in a way that is an extension of caring for those artists, too.”
De Lara started working with the museum nearly a decade ago as the collection and exhibition manager.
The university’s museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and, as a member of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, has compliance requirements for the collection that include climate control and the management of paperwork for items that go to other institutions on loan.
De Lara described the closure of the DePaul Art Museum as “a real loss for Chicago, which is a city that, compared to New York and Los Angeles, can so often be seen as kind of second rate.
”But DePaul’s art museum was one of those places that was helping fight that stigma, de Lara continued.
The museum was considered an important local venue for underrepresented artists. Its collection of more than 4,000 objects includes photography by famous artists such as Andy Warhol and Chicagoans Dawoud Bey and Paul D’Amato. The museum also owns a sizable collection of West African objects and Latino art.
On June 11, students who are part of an unofficial campus group called the DePaul Artist Collective held a demonstration outside the art museum. The students acquired some financial information and used it to make a poster outlining the university budget and the percentage of the museum’s operating cost, which, according to the poster, was 0.0006% percent of the total budget.
De Lara predicts that the percentage is even less now that the museum will cease to exist as it once did.
Ursula DeBray, a rising senior and president of the DePaul Artist Collective, said her group was disappointed that the university didn’t engage students in discussions about “reimagining the arts,” as the university noted in its February statement, at the institution in the wake of the museum’s closure.
“That conversation just never happened,” she said. “They just didn’t engage with any students or any faculty … and they didn’t respond to any of our letters.”
For recent graduate Grace Bradley, the DePaul Art Museum stood out to her as a prospective student. Ultimately, it was the deciding factor for her enrollment. She majored in art, media and design, and minored in museum studies.
“I found that I used [the DePaul Art Museum] in a lot of my classes,” Bradley said, noting that professors would take students to view exhibitions and select items from the collections. “It was just a different way of learning that sometimes made school feel a lot more interesting.”
While the loss of the DePaul museum feels significant, de Lara said she hopes Chicagoans will support other university art spaces around the city, including the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art and Columbia College’s Museum of Contemporary Photography.
“It’s a major loss for artists who are emerging artists who are not represented by galleries or have had sort of minimal exposure from the museum side of things,” de Lara said. “The more that folks can rally around the spaces that continue to do that kind of work, the better, especially right now,” de Lara said.
Internal and external requests to view the university collection after July 1 can be sent to de Lara at artcollection@depaul.edu.