After a two-year, $10m renovation, the Intuit Artwork Museum (previously often known as Intuit: The Heart for Intuitive and Outsider Artwork) will open for a public preview on 25 April throughout Expo Chicago, then formally on 23 Might for a grand reopening.
Intuit was launched in 1991 by a bunch of passionate volunteers who have been collectors, together with the artists Roger Brown and Don Baum. The centre took over the outdated Randolph Road Gallery on the primary ground of a 150-year-old brick constructing west of downtown. The museum has now tripled its footprint and features a decrease stage with its solely everlasting set up, the Henry Darger Room, which recreates the reclusive janitor’s one-room residence and studio in Chicago the place he lived for 40 years and produced an astonishing physique of labor. Chicago’s connection to outsider artwork runs deep; in 1951, the French artist and collector Jean Dubuffet gave a chat on the Arts Membership of Chicago on Artwork Brut, the style and motion he coined, which has since grown to embody outsider and self-taught artwork.
Intuit’s president and chief govt, Debra Kerr, a museum research educator with intensive institutional expertise, joined the museum in 2014 and helped increase the cash to get the constructing challenge off the bottom. She labored with the native structure agency Doyle & Associates to stability enhancements for entry and extra pure mild whereas preserving among the area’s historic character. For example, one thick yellow wall on the second ground has a patina of age that retains the white dice galleries on both facet from seeming too scientific.
The museum’s reconfigured first ground features a gallery that may function works from the everlasting assortment. Two spacious galleries on the second ground are dedicated to particular exhibitions and can host the inaugural present, Catalyst: Im/migration and Self-taught Artwork in Chicago (23 Might-11 January 2026), that includes the inventive contributions of migrants and immigrants in Chicago from the Thirties to the current.
Alison Amick, Intuit’s chief curator and director of exhibitions, says that help from the Terra Basis’s Artwork Design Chicago initiative allowed her and her co-curator Dana Boutin to take the time to analysis an space of the outsider artwork area that had not likely been explored.
“We spoke to greater than 200 folks and fashioned an advisory committee to assist information our considering,” Amick says. “Visually, will probably be very thrilling.” The exhibition options 75 works by 22 artists working in a variety of media together with, as an example, the work of Thomas Kong (1950-2023), who crammed his comfort retailer within the Rogers Park neighbourhood together with his collages and assemblages.
Rising consciousness
“We hope that the exhibition may be very generative and that we proceed to change into conscious of extra artists,” Amick says. “It received’t be an entire survey or maybe inclusive of each self-taught immigrant artist in Chicago, however we hope it can lead us to change into conscious of extra artists.”
Cleo Wilson, one of many founding board members of Intuit, labored on the Playboy Basis for 25 years, serving for the majority of that point as its govt director. She retired in 2005 however, even whereas working, she supported Intuit initially as communications director when it first opened, then later as its director.
“Early on, we didn’t wish to be a museum,” Wilson says. “It was Bob’s concept that we’d be a kunsthalle and we wouldn’t have a group,” she provides, referring to Bob Roth, a founding member and Intuit’s first president, who can also be the founder and former writer of the choice weekly newspaper the Chicago Reader—and Wilson’s accomplice.
The design by the native architects Doyle & Associates will enhance entry and introduce extra pure mild
Courtesy Intuit Artwork Museum
That modified, Wilson says, because the establishment started to obtain donations and because the visionary group of founders aged and pledged their collections to Intuit. Two of the galleries are named after founding members who left legacy items: Jan Petry, an artwork director and vice-president on the Leo Burnett promoting company who was additionally an artist and served on the board for 30 years till her demise at 85 in 2024; and Susann Craig, who had roots in vogue, who died aged 84 in 2021.
Wilson will even have an area named after her: the Heart for Studying, Engagement and Alternatives (Cleo). She provides: “I’ve seen different folks’s names on issues, however I by no means thought that will occur to me. Not unhealthy for a Black woman from the tasks.”
Catalyst: Im/migration and Self-taught Artwork in Chicago is at Intuit Artwork Museum, Chicago, 23 Might-11 January 2026
