Schaumburg officials were surprised Tuesday to learn that the director of a museum that closed mysteriously in December is living in Galena, where he has opened another museum with the same name.
Village officials have been trying to reach Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, director of the Chicago Athenaeum Museum, 190 S. Roselle Rd., since the museum closed its doors without notice. Artworks were left outside the museum, exposed to the elements and potential theft, and dozens of lights were left on in offices.
“We are quite concerned about the long-term plans of the museum,” said Christopher Huff, village planning director. Huff said mail the village has sent to the museum has been returned marked with a postal notice that the property has been vacated.
The Athenaeum, which moved to Schaumburg from Chicago in 1998, renewed its lease with the village in August for one year, according to Assistant Village Manager Brian Townsend. The museum leased the site in the heart of Town Square for $1, he said.
After relocating to Schaumburg, the 16-year-old non-profit museum–which features exhibitions on architecture, industrial and product design, graphics and urban planning–shut its Chicago location. That location was closed last year but remains listed on the Athenaeum Web site.
Huff said Schaumburg officials do not want to wait for the same fate to befall them.
“They owe us a straight answer,” he said, adding that village officials have no alternative plans for the site.
Ioannis Karalias, Athenaeum’s vice president, said he returned from a three-month trip to Greece two weeks ago and was not aware the village was trying to contact museum officials.
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Karalias said Monday that the Schaumburg location is not closing.
He said the museum is scheduled to reopen April 3 with a revamped permanent collection of manufacturing designs dating to the 1800s.
As of Tuesday, village officials had not been notified of the museum’s plans, Huff said.
Karalias said he and his business partner were at times difficult to reach because “we’ve taken some time to deal with personal issues and to reorganize our collection.”
Among Narkiewicz-Laine’s struggles was a January 2003 conviction on federal mail fraud charges for which he served 3 months in prison, according to Dan Dunne, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Narkiewicz-Laine, who was released Nov. 7, defrauded the Royal Danish Consulate of $62,000 for a 1996 exhibition on Danish architecture and design at the museum, Dunne said.
Narkiewicz-Laine also was ordered to pay a $20,000 fine and $62,000 in restitution and complete 300 hours of community service and three years of supervised release, according to Dunne.
In addition to opening the museum last month in Galena, Narkiewicz-Laine has been writing a book, Karalias said. Attempts to reach Narkiewicz-Laine were unsuccessful.
The museum in Galena, also called Chicago Athenaeum, will be a satellite of the larger suburban gallery, Karalias said.
“We may use it to house smaller exhibits, but it won’t replace the [Schaumburg] location,” he said.
Narkiewicz-Laine founded the Athenaeum in Chicago in 1988 and by the early 1990s had several galleries around the city, including in the Hancock Center and the Merchandise Mart.
At that time, the museum’s exhibitions were often “edgy and interesting,” said Kevin Harrington, a professor of architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology. “The shows encouraged the interchange of ideas between designers from around the world.”
But Harrington said the quality and depth of the exhibitions were inconsistent and the museum’s impact on the city’s architecture and design community was modest.
“There was no stability,” he said. “It was always operating fairly close to the edge.”
Victoria Matranga went to work at the Athenaeum in 1990.
“Christian was brilliant, creative and hardworking,” said Matranga, now a design historian for the International Housewares Association and author of several books on industrial design.
Matranga left the Athenaeum after two years, disillusioned, she said, with “Christian’s way of dealing with people.”
Matranga said she is concerned about the status of the museum’s permanent collection of architectural objects and papers, including donated works by Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan.
The collection is valued at more than $6 million, according to a tax return filed in 2001 by the Athenaeum.
Schaumburg officials hope the Athenaeum will remain a cultural landmark.
“I think the museum brings a lot of cultural value to the Town Square experience,” Village Manager Ken Fritz said. “We don’t want to see it go.”