The Art Institute of Chicago on Tuesday announced the $50 million Grainger Center for Conservation and Science, a space built within the museum’s footprint, which will double the amount of space devoted to artwork research and conservation.
The 25,000-square-foot space will open in 2027 in the former Regenstein Hall, the location of recent marquee exhibitions like “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World” and “Georgia O’Keeffe: My New Yorks.” The new center will centralize the museum’s 40-person conservation team, whose work is currently split across three levels of the museum.
“We’ve been thinking for a long time about the discrepancy between the quality of our team and the quality of our facilities,” James Rondeau, Art Institute museum president and director, says of the conservation department. “We’re making something that has been quintessentially behind the scenes and putting it in a facility that’s visible and central.”
Indeed, the Grainger Center will offer hitherto-unprecedented public engagement with the Art Institute’s conservation work. Glass doors will allow visitors to observe some conservation work from an anteroom gallery, which will feature rotating exhibitions tied to the department’s work. Some of that research came to the fore during the Art Institute’s 2023 Dalí exhibition, when conservators discovered that a Dali in their collection had been part of a set backdrop.
With the Grainger Center, the Art Institute will be able to devote gallery real estate to similar breakthroughs, Rondeau says.
“There’s rarely a show we do that doesn’t analyze the materials, the surfaces, the processes (of the art),” he says. “A space like this is going to make that legible.”
Francesca Casadio, executive director of the museum’s conservation and science department, calls the Grainger Center “the most consequential development for conservation at this institution” since the department was established in 1956. But she’s particularly eager about the space’s public-facing potential. As a chemistry student in Italy, Casadio was inspired to enter the field herself after observing a public conservation treatment at a museum.
“This aspect of having a space where we can share our discoveries and the care of the collection with the public, to me, is a transformation that will have tremendous benefits for people who come visit,” she says.
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Currently, much of the conservation team’s work happens in restricted areas of the museum, far from the public eye. Whether paintings, sculptures, or mixed media, most conservation and research work — imaging, sampling, chemical treatments, cleaning and even preparing artworks for travel — happens in an L-shaped corridor on the museum’s third floor. For more detailed queries — say, whether a tempera paint has a chicken-egg or quail-egg base — the team sends samples to local university partners for assessment.
“We prepare the samples in-house, but we use the very high-tech, mass-spec(trometry) equipment at Northwestern University. So, we have access to instrumentation that is a couple million dollars and would be incredibly expensive to maintain,” Casadio says.
Paintings currently get revarnished in that same L-shaped space, separated by a tracked curtain to create a barrier between that work and the rest of the space. During that process and other chemical applications, movable hoses suck out harmful fumes. Still, ideally, that work would happen in an isolated “spray room,” which will be included in the renovation.
“For now, if we have someone who’s doing a treatment on this table but we need to varnish another painting, then we have to do a big swap,” says paintings and frames conservation director Allison Langley.
Meanwhile, in the basement, a team led by assistant conservator Chris Brooks reworks frames for artworks. Sometimes that involves retrofitting an existing frame so it’s more structurally sound or up-to-date with the latest exhibition and conservation standards. In other cases, he and his team search for a period-appropriate frame to accommodate the artwork. The paintings unite with their frames in a third space, back on the first floor.
“We’ve been creative,” Langley says with a wry smile. “But the community of being with other conservators, just across the hall, will be nice.”
Not only will the Grainger Center centralize these operations, but it will tick several features off the conservation and science teams’ wishlist. Unlike the modestly sized windows of the current space, the Grainger Center will have floor-to-ceiling, west-facing windows — ideal for the copious natural light required when doing detail work on a piece. The science team will acquire more up-to-date digital imaging technology, improving their ability to visualize artworks layer by layer.
The center’s more open floor plan will also better facilitate large-scale conservation projects. Recently, Kerry James Marshall’s 10-by-12-foot “Many Mansions” had to be fixed up in a temporary workspace on the floor, effectively shutting down the conservation department to other work. Still larger artworks can’t even fit in the current space: Once the Grainger Center is up and running, the first artwork on Langley’s “wishlist” for a tune-up is O’Keeffe’s massive “Sky above Clouds IV,” hanging above the Arts of the Americas double staircase.
“Some artworks we just can’t quite do until we get more space,” Langley says. “We could close more galleries, but nobody wants to do that.”
Despite its current limitations, the team’s workflow is formidable. The day of our tour, the team was at work on more than a dozen different paintings. Two Rembrandts greeted us upon entry, perched on a ledge outside their frames. On a nearby easel was an O’Keeffe in a similar state of undress, awaiting conservation work.
The Grainger Center has been fully funded before construction, with the largest gift coming from its namesake, the Grainger Foundation. As work on the new space commences, the Art Institute’s largest rotating exhibition gallery — still called Regenstein Hall in its new location — has relocated to the former site of galleries 136 and 137, next to the museum’s spiral staircase. Its forthcoming Bruce Goff retrospective, in December, will inaugurate the move.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.