The longtime art collector and marketing executive Denise Gardner will become the
chairwoman of the Art Institute of Chicago in November, perhaps the country’s first
Black woman to hold that position on a major museum board.
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“It’s hard to avoid the historical significance,” Gardner said in a telephone interview
on Monday. “That does add a sense of responsibility and pressure to succeed, and
that’s fine with me. I like to exceed expectations.”

Gardner, 66, will succeed Robert M. Levy — whose term ends in November — at the
helm of the Institute’s school as well as the museum.

Having served for 15 years as a trustee and for five in her current role as vice chair,
Gardner has championed Black artists as well as art accessibility and education for
underrepresented audiences. “The work is still unfinished,” Gardner said. “In this
role, I can help the museum accelerate its progress.”

The appointment comes at a time when cultural institutions are seeking to diversify
their staffs, boards and programming. Gardner is also on the steering committee of
the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, established last fall to help museums
bring on more Black trustees, artists and curators.

“A leader with her credentials is exactly what we need right now to take us into the
future,” James Rondeau, the museum’s director, said in a phone interview on
Monday. Given the Art Institute’s ongoing commitment to diversity, he added, “The experiences and the perspectives that she brings as a Black woman who is so
connected to the city of Chicago will only be an asset.”

Gardner — together with her husband, Gary — was the lead individual sponsor of
the museum’s 2018 exhibition, “Charles White: A Retrospective,” which traveled to
the Museum of Modern of Art. (The Gardners own three White works on paper.)

​Her collection focuses on Black and female artists, including Frank Bowling, Nick
Cave and Carrie Mae Weems. She was an early buyer of Amy Sherald, whose
popularity has surged since her official portrait of Michelle Obama, which hangs in
the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

The New York Botanical Garden, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and the
Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas, are among 225 beneficiaries of new grants from
the National Endowment for the Humanities that were announced on Wednesday.

The grants, which total $24 million, will support projects at museums, libraries,
universities and historic sites in 45 states, as well as in Washington and Puerto Rico.
They will enable the excavation of a newly discovered ancient Egyptian brewery by
researchers from New York University, the implementation of a traveling exhibition
honoring Emmett Till’s legacy at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and
research for a biography of the congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis by
David Greenberg, a professor at Rutgers University.

Adam Wolfson, the endowment’s acting chairman, said in a statement that the new
projects “embody excellence, intellectual rigor and a dedication to the pursuit of
knowledge, even as our nation and the humanities community continue to face the
challenges of the pandemic.”

As part of a new grant program in archaeology and ethnography, seven of the
awards will support empirical field research, including the excavation of the ancient
city of Teotihuacan in central Mexico and the investigation of settlement and
migration patterns on the Micronesian islands of Pohnpei and Kosrae.

​In New York, 40 projects at the state’s cultural organizations will receive $6.6
million in grants. Funding will support the creation of a digital, open-access
database of the endangered Uto-Aztecan language Wixárika, from west-central
Mexico, at the New York Botanical Garden; the expansion of the Freedom of
Information Archive, a digital resource of 4.6 million declassified documents, at
Columbia University; and the production of a 15-episode “Radio Diaries”
documentary podcast series, which uses archival audio recordings to tell forgotten
stories of 20th century America, like that of the last surviving Watergate burglar.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — People talk a lot about getting back to pre-Covid normal. But our traditional art museums can forget about that. After a year of intense racial justice reckoning, a paralyzing pandemic and crippling economic shortfalls, aging hidebound institutions are scrambling just to stay afloat. And the only way for them to do so is to change. Strategies for forward motion are needed. One is in play here at the Speed Art Museum, in the form of a quietly passionate show called "Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” which might, with profit, be studied by other institutions in survivalist mode.

Conventional encyclopedic museums like the Speed, the largest and oldest art museum in Kentucky, are glacial machines. Their major exhibitions are usually years in the planning. Borrowing objects from other museums can be a red tape tangle. “Historical” shows, by definition, are usually confined to events and cultures of the past. “Promise, Witness, Remembrance” revises all of that. It speeds up exhibition production, focuses on the present, and in doing so reaches out to new audiences vital to the institutional future.

Combining works from the Speed’s permanent collection with loans in several cases directly from artists and galleries, the show was assembled and installed (beautifully) in a mere four months. And it was conceived as a direct response to a contemporary news event: the killing, by Louisville police, of Breonna Taylor, a Black 26-year-old medical worker, in March 2020. A posthumous painting of Taylor by the artist Amy Sherald
is the exhibition’s centerpiece, accompanied by photographs of local street protests sparked by her death and by the lenient treatment of the white officers involved.

The availability of the painting by Sherald, who is widely known for her earlier portrait of Michelle Obama, was the impetus for the show. Originally commissioned by Vanity Fair, it appeared on the cover of the magazine’s September 2020 issue. Sherald herself expressed interest in having the painting shown at the Speed, and in November the museum hired
Allison Glenn, an associate curator of contemporary art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., who, with astonishing speed and acuity, built an exhibition around it in Louisville, comprised entirely of Black artists, with funding found to keep the admission free.
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Accessibility, cultural and financial, are crucial features of the show. Until now, museums have generally ignored the country’s changing population demographics. The history that our big, general-interest art museums promote, through their preservation and display of objects, is primarily white history, with views of all other histories filtered through it. But that slanted perspective is no longer representative of audiences that museums will — speaking purely pragmatically — need to attract to survive.

​The Getty has partnered with the City of Los Angeles to rethink how the metropolis identifies and preserves local Black heritage landmarks.

The Los Angeles African American Historic Places Project, as the three-year initiative is called, will see the Getty’s Conservation Institute and the city’s Office of Historic Resources (OHR) work with communities and cultural institutions to celebrate sites that best represent Black life. 

The project is “ultimately about equity,” Conservation Institute director Tim Whalen said in a statement.

Currently, just over three percent of the city’s roughly 1,200 historic landmarks are tied to African American heritage, and part of the plan, Whalen said, is to examine preservation methods “for systemic bias.” 

“Historic preservation is about the acknowledgment and elevation of places and stories,” Whalen said, adding that the goal is to make sure “the stories and places of African Americans in Los Angeles are more present and complete.”

In addition to the designation of new landmark sites, the project will offer paid internships to young preservation professions and include a series of community programs.

While specific details about these and other projects are yet to be made public, the Conservation Institute and OHR have identified a handful of priorities for phase one, including developing plans to “manage, preserve, interpret, and celebrate the tangible and intangible heritage of historically Black neighborhoods.”