DePaul faculty, students call on university to reverse decision to close campus art museum

Several DePaul professors have written an open letter calling on the university to reconsider its decision to close its art museum. The university confirmed last week it plans to close its museum permanently on June 30.

Six faculty members organized the letter published online on Saturday. As of press time, more than 1,500 students, faculty, staff and alumni have added their names to the letter.

The museum is considered an important local venue for underrepresented artists. Its collection of more than 4,000 objects includes photography by artists including Andy Warhol and Chicagoans Dawoud Bey and Paul D’Amato. The museum also has a considerable holding of West African objects and Latino art.

The open letter is signed by arts leaders around Chicago, including the collections manager at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the curator at Old Dominion University’s Barry Art Museum and librarians from the School of the Art Institute.

The statement asks the university to reconsider the art museum’s closure on two grounds: “the basis of the internal and substantive pedagogical value that the museum’s collection” and “the external contribution that the museum makes toward bolstering DePaul’s profile as an institution so committed to the arts that it built an ‘arts corridor,’ which links DPAM to the recently constructed Music School, Arts and Letters building, and Theater School.”

Sean Kirkland, a philosophy professor at DePaul and principal organizer of the letter-writing campaign, said he was “shocked” and “didn’t anticipate” the museum’s closure.

The news comes two months after DePaul University laid off 114 employees in December.

“We'd heard, of course, that there were financial pressures and that kind of thing, but we really didn't expect that closure would be the response to those pressures,” Kirkland said.

The goal of the letter is to “try to generate some kind of public outcry about the closure and see if we could reverse the administration's decision,” he said.

While the university has not yet responded to the petition, the group plans to formally present it to three top administrators this week: President Rob Manuel, Provost Salma Ghanem and Executive V.P. Sherri Sidler.

Kirkland said the museum is a loss for the students in his environmental philosophy class, who typically visit when there are exhibitions that relate to the natural world.

“Many of us look for every opportunity to introduce our students to the museum space and to the collection,” Kirkland said. “We kind of want to confront our students with things that push them outside the sphere of utility and cause them to think in new ways and experience the world in new ways. And that seems to me precisely what art does.”