A walk through the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center’s first floor is a walk through African American history. It begins with slavery, and a visualization of slave ships arriving in the Americas, informed by primary-source insurance documents; the haunting progression shows vessels at first dotting the Atlantic, then overwhelming it. It ends with footage from Barack Obama’s election night address.
Next to that video screen is a blank wall. “I was really hoping to have a section about President Kamala Harris over here,” museum President Perri Irmer said Thursday. The small tour group following her collectively sighed.
Irmer is preaching to the choir. Walking through the DuSable with her were 31st District State Rep. Mike Crawford, 78th District State Rep. Camille Lilly and 8th District State Rep. La Shawn Ford — all Democrats, all representing districts in Chicago. Three more state representatives had staffers joining the tour as proxies. After this, they headed to the Art Institute of Chicago, then the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Among them was the tour’s organizer, 5th district Rep. Kimberly DuBuclet. She organized it as the new chair of the Illinois House’s reconstituted Museum, Arts, Culture and Entertainment committee, succeeding longtime chair and current assistant majority leader Rep. Camille Lilly in January. Since then, DuBuclet stepped up the committee’s presence in response to federal cuts to the cultural sector and the unprecedented content reviews of the Smithsonian by President Donald Trump’s administration.
This tour wass the first of several planned by DuBuclet’s office to connect museum professionals directly to legislators in Springfield — to understand their needs, their fears and their importance in an increasingly fraught political landscape.
“It’s not just about looking at pictures,” DuBuclet said. “It’s about preserving our history and understanding where we come from.”
Though this first tour was not bipartisan, DuBuclet’s committee — MACE, for short — is. It has seven Democrats and four Republican members. Thursday’s three-museum jaunt was a blueprint for more tours to follow. One, tentatively scheduled for mid-November, will head to Chicago’s Museum Campus. Future tours will visit cultural institutions outside of Chicago, closer to Republican-led districts.
“Based on the feedback I’ve gotten from my downstate colleagues, from my colleagues across the aisle, they’re very excited to see what we’re going to do with the committee,” DuBuclet said.
The DuSable was a stark first stop. Compared to the well-heeled Art Institute and MCA, the Hyde Park institution is in a transitional period. Currently, about half of the DuSable’s footprint is shrouded by construction as it installs a new exhibition, “Paris in Black,” about African American expats in France.
Irmer is eyeing much-needed facilities improvements and expansions in order to welcome a projected tourism influx to Hyde Park tied to the Obama Presidential Center, about a mile southeast. One estimate places the number of new visitors to the center alone at 2 million per year — and that doesn’t count returning visitors.
That goal will be hard-won. Like its peers, DuSable is scrambling for funds as once-reliable philanthropic foundations and donors change course to triage the effects of federal cutbacks. And an expected National Endowment for the Humanities grant supporting its Juneteenth programming — a major annual draw for the museum — was terminated this year.
It’s not lost on Irmer that DuSable’s identity as a Black history museum and Smithsonian affiliate may further place the museum in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. But she also sees it as an asset. At a time when artifacts at Smithsonian institutions in Washington, D.C., are under scrutiny, DuSable’s Smithsonian affiliation allows it to hypothetically receive and display objects not on display elsewhere. D.C.’s loss may be Chicago’s gain.
“We can help to be either the safe keepers of things that are being endangered, or we can rally other Black museums around the country to be of help,” Irmer said.
For the DuSable Museum, sheer dollars go a long way. At the Art Institute, private-public partnerships take on a different face. Meeting with DuBuclet and her colleagues in a sleek conference room overlooking Monroe Street, Director James Rondeau touted the Art Institute as offering the most free access of any paid-admission museum in the nation.
“Access truly makes a difference,” he told the representatives.
Later, Robin Schnur, the executive director of the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Learning Center at the Art Institute, elicited a conversation-stopping round of applause from representatives as she described the Artist’s Studio at the Library, a partnership with the Chicago Public Library. As of this summer, the Art Institute scaled up the initiative to provide arts-and-crafts centers at all of CPL’s 81 branch locations.
“We’re meeting Chicagoans in every neighborhood,” Schnur said.
Unlike the DuSable Museum, the Art Institute has seen no significant shifts in donor behavior post-inauguration, Rondeau said. However, persuading donors to put up funds for necessary but mundane infrastructural improvements — reinstalled windows, a new HVAC system — is “always the most difficult, if not impossible” fundraising ask, he said.
Over the past decade, those key projects have been undertaken thanks to $1.7 million in public sector grants. And while the $5 million the Art Institute receives annually from the state and city may pale in comparison to some of the museum’s recent individual private gifts, it still makes up 5% of its annual budget.
“If we lost that money, there would be no way for us to accommodate other than reducing jobs,” Rondeau said.
Those jobs need not be curatorial or artistic. DuBuclet said a major takeaway for her from the tour was how many professions could find work in the arts, from chemists to electricians and plumbers. She intended to commission a new economic impact report to hit that home to her assembly colleagues, as well as to quantify the ripple effects of cultural institutions on the state’s economy, possibly in conjunction with the Illinois House’s International Relations, Tourism and Trade Committee.
After the tour, DuBuclet said her resolve to communicate the importance of the arts to her colleagues in Springfield — despite an ever-austere funding environment for the state — had only deepened.
“New York is becoming too expensive; LA is a little bit more scattered,” she said. “We have let people know that Chicago should be, could be, and is the cultural hub of the United States.”
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.