Crain\u2019s<\/a> in 2016, the museum\u2019s budget received half a million dollars from the university, which at the time had an annual budget of $500 million; the school\u2019s operating budget for 2026 is $610 million.<\/p>\n\u201cBesides this being a loss to the city, it\u2019s such a loss to the university,\u201d said Phoebe Collins, the museum\u2019s collection and exhibition manager. \u201cWe have a lot of students that work here with us who are losing their jobs at the end of June, but we have a lot of classes that come.\u201d<\/p>\n
Class visits, she said, entail \u201cworking with the professor to pull pieces from our collection that will match what they\u2019re talking about in their classes. It\u2019s a really great way for students to learn about art and see it in a different way, because of course we get art history students, but we also get anthropology students, I have a biology art class that comes, and we\u2019ve also worked with classes from the business school and the college of computing and digital media. It\u2019s tragic that this resource for the students is going to be lost. DePaul also has a museum studies minor and we work with them a lot, so that\u2019s of course a huge loss to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to serving faculty and students, the museum was a place for \u201cartists that had been underrecognized in Chicago, as well as nationally and internationally,\u201d said museum director Laura-Caroline de Lara. \u201cOur mission was to highlight those voices who weren\u2019t being shown at larger institutions. So we became known as a place that was a forerunner for introducing names that would become some of Chicago\u2019s biggest known artists working today, including Brendan Fernandes, Caroline Kent and Evette Mayorga.\u201d<\/p>\n
The focus, de Lara said, \u201cwas on social justice topics and that felt like a really important part of Chicago\u2019s art landscape \u2014 to talk about everything from police brutality to domestic violence to climate change through artwork. It wasn\u2019t just about putting artwork on the wall, but about creating opportunities for conversations about these issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
The DePaul Art Museum has a permanent collection of more than 3,000 objects, including pieces by Andy Warhol and the surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie. It is not yet clear what the university intends to do with the collection. According to DePaul, \u201cIn the coming weeks, we will convene a discussion with our university community to explore how the museum building and its collections can continue to serve as assets to DePaul.\u201d<\/p>\n
The options come down to selling off or donating the collection to other museums, or the university may wish to retain it. \u201cBut without a staff to take care of the collection, preservation of the art is at risk,\u201d said Collins. \u201cMuseum missions are often about taking care of and preserving works of art.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for the building itself, DePaul says it has \u201cno plans to sell the museum building or leave it vacant. The building occupies a prominent location on our Lincoln Park Campus, and we believe it holds significant potential to be transformed into a space that continues to enrich the student experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
The announcement came from university president Robert L. Manuel, provost Salma Ghanem and executive vice president & CFO Sherri Sidler.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/CTC-L-DEPAUL-ART-01.jpg\")
The exhibition “Alice Tippit: Rose Obsolete,” curated by Ionit Behar, opens March 5 at the DePaul Art Museum. (Provided by DPAM)
\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/CTC-L-DEPAUL-ART-02.jpg\")
The exhibition “Barbara Nessim: My Compass is the Line,” curated by Ionit Behar, opens March 5 at the DePaul Art Museum. (Provided by DPAM)<\/p>\n
For artists, this is one less place to show their work and earn an income from that work.<\/p>\n
\u201cArtists get an honorarium to show their work,\u201d said Collins. \u201cWe also commission artists to do work for different shows. We will also pay artists to do programming here, whether it\u2019s a panel discussion or a dance performance, for example. And we also buy artwork from artists and galleries.\u201d<\/p>\n
The museum world is small, she said, \u201cand the arts and humanities don\u2019t have any help right now from the federal government. Smaller grants from family foundations are harder and harder to get because there\u2019s more competition for them.\u201d As with many professions at the moment, there are fewer job openings than ever. \u201cAll museums are struggling which makes this a really hard job market.\u201d<\/p>\n
For de Lara, who has worked at the DePaul Art Museum for 10 years, the space itself has been a second home. It\u2019s also where she got married.<\/p>\n
The museum, says Tribune contributing art critic Lori Waxman, \u201chas been critical in giving a huge number of local and minority artists their due. Selva Aparicio, Krista Franklin, the Stockyard Institute, Karolina Gnatowski, Eric J. Garcia, Huong Ngo, among others, all had their first museum solo shows here. DPAM has been running a multiyear initiative to increase the visibility of Latinx artists, with programming, collecting, bilingual signage, and more.\u201d<\/p>\n
And, she added, \u201cDPAM has been unafraid to be boldly political, exploring the connections between police torture in Chicago and human rights violations in Guantanamo; documenting the work of Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America, a seminal activist campaign of the 1980s; showing us the truth about the Young Lords Organization, who rallied for the rights of the Puerto Rican community in Chicago in the 1950s and \u201960s. No other museum in Chicagoland has done this crucial work so solidly and so consistently.\u201d<\/p>\n
In December, the Tribune reported<\/a> that the Chicago Plan Commission approved a proposal by DePaul to build a \u201c$42 million basketball practice facility in the heart of its Lincoln Park campus, a controversial plan that will require demolishing a row of century-old residential buildings.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since 2011, the DePaul Art Museum has featured the work of contemporary artists, many of whom are based…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":618463,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,1370,1072,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-618462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-latest-headlines","tag-things-to-do","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116139216529737792","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618462\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}