“Historical manifestations of dandyism range from absolute precision in dress and tailoring to flamboyance and fabulousness in dress and style,” Miller wrote in the exhibit catalog. “Whether a dandy is subtle or spectacular, we recognize and respect the deliberateness of the dress, the self-conscious display, the reach for tailored perfection, and the sometimes subversive self-expression.”

The exhibit, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” draws on other sources beyond Miller’s book. It’s organized into 12 sections. Each symbolizes a characteristic of dandy style as defined by Zora Neale Hurston in her 1934 essay, “Characteristics of Negro Expression.”

See photos from the blue carpet.

The exact status of the artwork remains unclear.

“More information will be released to campus regarding some of the sale details in the coming days,” Michael Fenton said in a Monday email to the Post-Tribune. “As stated in our original plan, the sale of these paintings was to fund the renovations, which are scheduled to begin this summer and last until Fall, 2026.”

The three works in question are “Rust Red Hills” by Georgia O’Keeffe, Frederic E. Church’s “Mountain Landscape,” and “The Silver Vale and the Golden Gate” by Childe Hassam.

According to appraisals received by the university, the fair market value of the O’Keeffe is estimated at $10.5 million to $15 million; the Hassam, between $1 million and $3.5 million; and the Church at $1 million to $3 million.

Fenton has said that the projected cost of renovating Brandt Hall and Wehrenberg Hall for first-year students is approximately $8 million. The renovated dorms are slated to have a gallery displaying lesser-known works of art from the Sloan Trust, which provided directly or indirectly for the three paintings being sold off.

“I can confirm that we have made enough progress to move forward with the planned resident hall renovations,” Fenton said.

The update of sorts comes on the heels of a Thursday article in Bloomberg that Moody’s Investor Services, Inc. has downgraded Valparaiso University two notches to a junk rating, which could, per the article, raise the university’s borrowing costs.

In an April 30 report, Moody’s noted that “the highly competitive student market poses ongoing difficulties for enrollment management. Inability to boost net tuition revenue will further limit financial reserves and the university’s capacity to address operating deficits in the short term.”

The negative outlook, Moody’s said, “reflects the potential for continued enrollment challenges resulting in pressure to balance operations.”

Moody’s also said the university’s “substantial wealth, totaling nearly $350 million in cash and investments,” as well as strong donor support and its regional reputation, weighed in the university’s favor.

“Moreover, management’s efforts to restructure operations to cut costs and increase revenue are favorable for long-term prospects,” the report stated.

Fenton said via email that the university will continue to work with Moody’s to show everything the university is doing to further strengthen its financial foundation, implement its strategic plan, and address the challenges facing higher education.

“The University is undertaking innovative enrollment strategies, a comprehensive fundraising campaign, and reinvestment in campus operations,” Fenton said.

“As Moody’s points out in its statement, we are confident in our ability to continue to meet our mission as a Lutheran institution that prepares students not only for successful lives and careers, but also as servant leaders in church and society.”

Both the university’s Moody’s rating and its enrollment have struggled in recent years.

Moody’s downgraded the university’s bond rating two years ago as well. At its peak, in 2016, the university’s bond rating was A2 but it’s been slipping since then and is now Baa2. The fact that the drop coincided with the university’s decreasing enrollment was not a coincidence, a Moody’s official said then, and news about the sale of the artwork also was a factor that Moody’s took into consideration when doling out Valparaiso University’s rating in 2023.

Valparaiso University’s fall and new student headcount both dropped in the past two years after numbers began to climb slightly in 2022, as the direct impact of the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic began to wane. Still, according to enrollment figures on the university’s website for August, both numbers are below where they were in the fall of 2019 before the pandemic began.

The university had 852 new students in August, compared to 1,004 five years ago. Likewise, this year’s total fall headcount was 2,598 students, compared to 3,521 in fall 2019. Only 16 students from the latter count were in the university’s law school, its last cohort before it closed.

The university filed a petition almost a year ago to move forward with the auction of the art from the Brauer Museum to fund freshman dorm renovations, noting a $9 million deficit and declining student enrollment.

A Porter Superior Court judge ultimately granted the petition, which required modifying the trust that provided the artwork to allow for the sale.

Valparaiso University President José Padilla first announced the plans in February 2023, garnering stiff criticism from the campus community, including faculty and students, as well as the art world.

The faculty senate issued a vote of no confidence for Padilla in the fall. He has announced he’s retiring at the end of the year.

alavalley@chicagotribune.com

The Pulitzers’ prestigious public service medal went to ProPublica for the second straight year. Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser, Cassandra Jaramillo and Stacy Kranitz were honored for reporting on pregnant women who died after doctors delayed urgent care in states with strict abortion laws.

The Washington Post won for “urgent and illuminating” breaking news coverage of the Trump assassination attempt. The Pulitzers honored Ann Telnaes, who quit the Post in January after the news outlet refused to run her editorial cartoon lampooning tech chiefs — including Post owner Jeff Bezos — cozying up to Trump. The Pulitzers praised her “fearlessness.”

The Pulitzers honored the best in journalism from 2024 in 15 categories, along with eight arts categories including books, music and theater. The public service winner receives a gold medal. All other winners receive $15,000.

The New York Times showed its breadth with awards honoring reporting from Afghanistan, Sudan, Baltimore and Butler, Pennsylvania. Doug Mills won in breaking news photography for his pictures of the Trump assassination attempt, including one that captured a bullet in the air near the GOP candidate.

The Times’ Azam Ahmed and Christina Goldbaum and contributing writer Matthieu Aikins won an explanatory reporting prize for examining U.S. policy failures in Afghanistan. Declan Walsh and the Times’ staff won for an investigation into the Sudan conflict.

A big milestone for a new local news outlet

The Times was also part of a collaboration with The Baltimore Banner, whose reporters Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme and Jessica Gallagher won in local reporting for stories on that city’s fentanyl crisis and its disproportionate effect on Black men. The Banner was created three years ago, with several staffers who had left the Baltimore Sun.

“This is a huge milestone for us,” editor in chief Kimi Yoshino said in an interview. “I told the newsroom today that never in my wildest dreams did I think we would be here at this moment. It is a testament to the power of local news, the need for local news and what journalists can do when they focus on important stories in our community.”

The Banner created a statistical model that it shared with journalists in cities like Boston, Chicago and San Francisco for stories there, she said.

Reuters won for its own investigative series on fentanyl, showing how lax regulation both inside and outside the United States makes the drug inexpensive and widely available. inewsource.org in San Diego was a finalist in the illustrated reporting and commentary category for its stories on fentanyl.

The New Yorker’s Mosab Abu Toha won for his commentaries on Gaza. The magazine also won for its “In the Dark” podcast about the killing of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military and in feature photography for Moises Saman’s pictures of the Sednaya prison in Syria.

The Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer for its reporting on Elon Musk, “including his turn to conservative politics, his use of legal and illegal drugs and his private conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin,” the Pulitzer board said. The Journal was also a finalist for its “cool-headed” reporting on the plight of Evan Gershkovich, who was imprisoned in Russia.

A special citation for a career covering civil rights

The Pulitzers also gave a special citation to the late Chuck Stone for his work covering the civil rights movement. The pioneering journalist was the first Black columnist at the Philadelphia Daily News and founded the National Association of Black Journalists.

Mark Warren of Esquire won the feature writing prize for his portrait of a Baptist pastor and small-town mayor who died by suicide after his secret online life was exposed by a right-wing news site.

Alexandra Lange, a contributing writer for Bloomberg CityLab won an award in criticism for “graceful and genre-expanding” writing about public spaces for families.

The Houston Chronicle Raj Mankad, Sharon Steinmann, Lisa Falkenberg and Leah Binkovitz won the Pulitzer in editorial writing for its series on dangerous train crossings.

The Associated Press was a finalist in breaking news reporting for its own coverage of the Trump assassination attempt, and in investigative reporting for its partnership with PBS FRONTLINE and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland and at Arizona State University for stories documenting more than 1,000 deaths at the hands of police using methods of subduing people that were supposed to be non-lethal.

Or rather, some imagined Chicago past.

Fake, who once upon a time could be found behind the counter of Quimby’s in Wicker Park (until he left for California), was never one to be pinned down on anything. He worked as a tattoo artist and ran the comics department at Quimby’s. He cofounded the ongoing Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, and was the author of a long-running comic, “Gaylord Phoenix,” which offered nothing resembling a clear narrative. Since the trans artist’s gallery pieces tended to focus on Chicago’s queer community, the facades of his Memory Palaces were long-defunct queer bars and clubs and theaters and feminist spaces — Club LaRay, Nightgowns, the underground abortion clinic Jane Collective — reimagined.

Except when they weren’t.

I remember an interview with Fake in which he said people always want him to explain what he does and to make it a little clearer, and he just never feels like it. Recently, for instance, he installed a two-story mural in the atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; it’ll be there for exactly one year. It’s another Memory Palace of sorts, featuring the same pleasing stained-glass colors, art deco angularity and kaleidoscope of patterns. It reminds me of the buzzing, early-digital PBS commercials from the 1970s.

Except this Memory Palace is about an imagined future.

The title is “The Free Clinic for Gender Affirming Care,” and according to the MCA, it shows the front of a “utopian” clinic for transgender healthcare, “a majestic counterview to the present reality in the United States, where transgender and nonbinary people are under constant threat of political repression, restriction and scapegoating.” Unless, of course, you just look at the work, without reading the wall text. You might miss some of that.

“Actually, I feel like the wall piece is pretty blunt,” said Fake, who now lives in the desert  outside Los Angeles. “I wanted there to be a sense of beauty and extravagance, for it to visualize this striking space as a place very much needed. But since you see the mural before the title, it is like comics in that it’s also a game of words and images, and how both interact can create a meaning. I just wanted to show things you can’t necessarily convey in words, and so the visuals in front of you, they’re like an amplifier of thoughts.”

The mural was made as an extension of an upcoming MCA exhibit, “City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago,” opening July 5. Assistant curator Jack Schneider sought out Fake for the museum’s ongoing Atrium Project series, which invites artists to redesign the large wall (beside the ticket sellers) in the building’s front entrance. “I also thought Edie would be a good artist to bring the political discussions in the exhibit up to date.” The result, Scheider said, is “something that’s unmistakably, distinctly Edie’s.”

Meaning, standing in front of the mural, this jumble of an ecstatic home, it’s hard not to see both the past and the future. I think of quilts and ‘80s vector-graphic video games; I see drug capsules and shutters from old homes; I see the crosscut port window of the “Amityville Horror” house, and animated cartoons sprinkled throughout “Sesame Street.”

I also saw, more importantly, warmth — a welcoming place.

Fake’s facades stem from “the way people make spaces together then a community happens, and falls apart, and reforms,” he said. “There’s a world-building aspect for me. It’s how I would like the world to be. I think it helps my mind to think of what that world might look like.” He saw the scale of the museum wall as “an opportunity for responding directly to such a tenuous time for trans healthcare and the need to do something now.”

Once he had the idea, it assembled quickly. And really, it only seems like a single building. If it existed, it would be a mash of places. As with his Chicago-born Memory Palaces, it suggests the way architecture get stacked over time, bundling old and new.

“But more dreamlike than Chicago,” he said.

The morning that the mural — which was hand-drawn to scale, then digitally recreated and printed onto a kind of large vinyl wallpaper — was finally ready for museum viewers, Schneider walked in and stopped before it. He hadn’t seen it finished yet, he said, admiring. It’s so different from the austerity of Chicago architecture, he said. So different from the blocky Brutalism of the museum itself. Manuel Venegas, the museum’s director of media relations, asked Schneider to explain the meaning behind the many windows and doors of this shanty town-esque fantasia.

Well, they’re actually large enough to pass through, he said. The front door there, albeit 2-D, is placed level with the museum floor. The windows are roughly the size of windows in a home.

“It’s like … an invitation,” Venegas said.

“It is an invitation,” Schneider said.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

“We regret to inform you,” it read, “that your IMLS grant has been terminated.”

A termination notice from the institute’s new acting Director Keith Sonderling was attached to the 38-word email.

“Best wishes,” the message concluded.

IMLS provides significant funding to libraries, museums and other educational institutions across the country. Amid Trump’s order to shutter the agency, several Illinois museums have had their grants terminated, including the DuPage Children’s Museum, Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Pilsen neighborhood, the Chicago History Museum, the McLean County Museum of History in Bloomington and the Galena and U.S. Grant Museum in western Illinois.

The agency did not respond to repeated requests for comment, making it difficult to know how much funding has been terminated in recent weeks.

DuPage Children’s Museum was awarded an $84,729 grant to help create a traveling exhibit it could bring to area libraries, according to Andrea Ingram, the museum’s president and CEO. The venture would have been an extension of a standing exhibit at the Naperville museum called, “The Questioneers: Read. Question. Think. PLAY!”

The exhibit is inspired by a book series from local author Andrea Beaty. Ingram described the books as “just beautiful stories (about) these second graders who are all different.”

But in the termination notice to DuPage Children’s Museum, the institution was told that upon further review, its grant “is unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency’s priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and the IMLS Program.”

Ingram, in an interview at the museum’s three-story location near downtown Naperville, said, “I don’t think that this is the type of bureaucracy reduction anybody believed was going to be forthcoming.”

“My job is joy,” she said, children’s shouts and laughter sounding off in the background. “I mean, the very definition of what we do here is joyful learning.”

Over the past decade, Ingram estimated the DuPage Children’s Museum has received about $1 million in IMLS competitive grants for various projects.

Ingram said she doesn’t know what’s going to happen to the museum’s defunded exhibit. But to her, the matter is bigger than her museum’s programming alone, she said.

“We must keep (in mind) that this is not about $80,000 to (DuPage Children’s Museum),” she said. “It’s about the systems that we depend on. … I bet most Americans didn’t know what IMLS is, and that’s OK. We don’t need to know that there is a backbone that makes this work.”

Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art had three active multiyear grants terminated by IMLS, according to the museum’s Chief Development Officer Barbara Engelskirchen. Among those was a $556,726 grant that would have paid for an internship program over a three-year period, Engelskirchen said. Without the funding, the program will be canceled, she said.

Other active grants included a two-year $475,000 grant to help make the National Museum of Mexican Art more accessible to people with disabilities as well as a three-year $245,341 grant to support programming the museum does in partnership with Chicago Public Schools, Engelskirchen said.

Both are set to move forward despite the loss in funding. For the accessibility project, the National Museum of Mexican Art has received and spent about half of its funding, Engelskirchen said. The museum will pay for the rest of the project’s costs itself, she said.

As for CPS programming, the initiative — whose focus is helping teachers incorporate Mexican art and culture into their curriculum — is supported through other funding sources. Lack of IMLS funding will likely just “decrease the number of children we’ll be able to reach,” Engelskirchen said.

At the Chicago History Museum, an IMLS grant was recently terminated, according to Michael Anderson, the museum’s vice president of external engagement and development. The museum had received some of the $241,759 it was promised, but the remainder was canceled. IMLS money was funding about one-fourth of the total project, an exhibition about the Latino community in Chicago called “Aquí en Chicago.”

“There’s, I think, a sense right now that if you’re too DEI-focused or if you’re too inclusive or if you are supporting stories or narratives that don’t align with the current politics, you will either be punished or defunded,” Anderson said.

The museum had already begun building out the exhibition space when they learned their grant had been terminated, Anderson said. The exhibit is still on track to open in the fall, although they may need to look for additional funding sources from the museum’s donor base or modify some aspects of the exhibition.

Beyond “Aquí en Chicago,” Anderson worries about funding for future programs.

“There is value in history,” Anderson said. “There is value in knowing where we’ve come from, and it helps inform where we’re going. And it does feel a little bit like a gutting of, or a singling out of, history and the value of history … it’s a slippery slope.”

In Aurora, the Grand Army of the Republic Museum received IMLS grant funding in 2023 to pay for equipment meant to help preserve the museum’s wartime artifacts, according to a spokesperson from the city. The grant, which totaled just under $42,000, is set to expire Aug. 31.

The city of Aurora said it has been unable to request an extension of the grant to continue the project since IMLS staff were placed on leave March 31 as part of Trump’s dismantling of the agency. Officials also do not know how to request a reimbursement once they’ve spent the funds. However, the city set aside $50,000 for the project, so they expect it to move forward regardless of hold-ups with the IMLS funding, although the grant would “certainly amplify the scope of the project,” the city spokesperson said.

Along the Illinois-Iowa border, the Galena and U.S. Grant Museum had been counting on more than $576,000 from IMLS. But earlier this month, the museum received the same termination letter sent to DuPage Children’s Museum, well wishes and all.

The allocation was slated to help with collection care as the museum transitions to a new facility, according to Tessa Flak, executive director of the Galena-Jo Daviess County Historical Society,.

The museum — which has exhibits honoring hometown hero Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general and 18th president of the United States — has been housed in a 10,000 square-foot building owned by the city of Galena since 1938. For the past 18 years, the museum has slowly been working toward building its own facility, Flak said. An $11 million venture, the museum just broke ground on its new facility April 3.

IMLS funding would have helped move the museum’s 14,000-plus artifacts to its new facility, as well as establish an archives room and museum-rate exhibit cases at the burgeoning space, Flak said.

On April 21, Flak sent a letter to IMLS appealing the museum’s grant termination.

“Sudden and unexplained cancellation of active grants undermine the trust in the federal process, especially for small and mid-sized institutions that rely on these partnerships to serve their communities,” the letter read.  “We are concerned that this will have a chilling effect, not just for our museum, but for cultural institutions across the country that play a vital role in public education and civic life.”

In the meantime, the museum will be launching a GoFundMe to try to make up for the cuts.

tkenny@chicagotribune.com

mmorrow@chicagotribune.com

The drawing “Russian War Prisoner” was purchased by the Art Institute in 1966, but investigators for the Manhattan district attorney’s office had asserted that it and other works once owned by entertainer and art collector Fritz Grünbaum had been looted by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Many of the works created by Schiele, the Austrian Expressionist, that Grünbaum owned ended up in the hands of museums and collectors around the world. Grünbaum’s heirs have spent years working to reclaim them.

In her ruling, New York Supreme Court Judge Althea Drysdale said she agreed that the work had been stolen from Grünbaum by the Nazis. “ ‘Russian War Prisoner’ has been stolen property for the last 86 years,” she said in a 25-minute reading of her order from the bench.

Over the past two years, other museums and private collectors had returned Schiele works to the heirs after being presented evidence by the investigators that they had been seized by the Nazis. But the Art Institute disputed that evidence and challenged the jurisdiction of the Manhattan district attorney to bring what was a criminal proceeding that treated the museum’s Schiele as stolen property.

In hearings last year, the district attorney’s office accused the Chicago museum of ignoring evidence of an elaborate fraud undertaken to conceal that the artwork had been stolen from Grünbaum by the Nazis on the eve of World War II.

The museum insisted there was no evidence to suggest the work had been stolen, and it challenged the authority of the investigators to lay claim to a painting that had been located beyond New York for 60 years, arguing that disputes like this are civil matters and that New York criminal law has no place in the discussion. Instead, it said, the drawing had legitimately passed from Grünbaum to his sister-in-law, who had sold it to a Swiss dealer after the war.

Its refusal of the art unit’s claims represented a sustained and very public battle threatening to undercut the trafficking unit’s authority in this case — and by extension, many others. But in her 79-page ruling, Drysdale agreed with the investigators on all points.

She found that the work could still be considered stolen property under New York law, that the criminal laws applied and that New York investigators had jurisdiction over the matter. The Manhattan investigators had argued they had jurisdiction because the Schiele works were owned by a New York gallery before being sold on to other owners.

She also found that the Art Institute had failed to make reasonable inquiries about the work’s provenance when it acquired the work and did not live up to its own standards for provenance research.

“We are disappointed with the ruling,” Megan Michienzi, a spokesperson for the museum, said in a statement. “We are reviewing the court’s decision and will look at all available options for appeal.” These options include applying for a stay on the handover of the work to investigators.

Raymond Dowd, the lawyer for the Grünbaum heirs, welcomed the decision. “This judge wrote a clear warning call to any people in the world who are hiding Nazi looted art that you had better not bring it anywhere near New York. Ever,” he said.

The Art Institute routinely displayed the work during its many years at the museum until it was seized in place by investigators in 2023 on the basis of a warrant signed by Drysdale.

In her decision, she not only discussed the law but also the history of the work, of Grünbaum and of the artist who created the drawing.

“Throughout his storied career, Grünbaum was an outspoken critic of the treatment of Jews in Austria,” she wrote. “This advocacy, coupled with his Jewish heritage and his fame within Vienna’s performing arts industry, would lead to his capture, imprisonment at Dachau Concentration Camp, and murder at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.”

At the center of the dispute was the question of what happened to the drawing and other Schiele works when they were deposited by Grünbaum’s family at a storage facility in Vienna in 1938. Investigators in the Manhattan district attorney’s art trafficking unit maintained that this was tantamount to surrendering them to the Nazis, who they say controlled the warehouse.

The museum said that while the storage company had been “affiliated” with the Nazi regime, it “also provided lawful storage and moving services to Jewish families” including to Grünbaum’s sister-in-law, Mathilde Lukacs, who the museum argued had inherited the drawing and others from the entertainer’s collection.

The dealer who brought “Russian War Prisoner” and other Schieles once owned by Grünbaum to the New York art market in the 1950s, Eberhard Kornfeld, said he had bought them from Lukacs. The museum said it believed his account to be credible.

But the New York investigators worked to compile evidence that the judge embraced as a convincing rebuttal of Kornfeld’s account. She noted that investigators dismissed as forgeries the several invoices that Kornfeld produced as evidence of his transactions with Lukacs. On some the signature for her name was misspelled, for example.

“It’s highly improbable that Mathilde Lukacs ever obtained proper title to ‘Russian War Prisoner,’ ” Drysdale said, and she suggested the museum needed to have done more to investigate the work’s ownership trail.

“They instead relied upon the assurances of a discredited art dealer with an obvious self-serving agenda,” she wrote in her ruling.

Before Manhattan investigators entered the debate, the Grünbaum artworks had already been the subject of considerable civil litigation in which other courts have come to varying conclusions.

In 2018, a New York Supreme Court judge ruled in the case of two other Schiele drawings that Grünbaum never sold or surrendered any works before his death, and that they were indeed looted by the Nazis, making his heirs their true owners.

In another civil case, a federal court ruled on procedural grounds that the Grünbaum heirs came forward too late to lay claim to the works and described Kornfeld’s account as credible. “Russian War Prisoner” is also the subject of a separate civil case in federal court in New York in which the Art Institute is arguing it has good title to the drawing.

Dowd, who represents the Grünbaum heirs, said that he did not think “the federal procedure survives” Drysdale’s decision.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Sotheby’s auction house announced the sale on Wednesday, Shakespeare’s 461st birthday. It said the May 23 sale will be the first time since 1989 that a set of the First, Second, Third and Fourth Folios has been offered at auction as a single lot.

The auction house estimated the sale price at between 3.5 million and 4.5 million pounds.

After Shakespeare’s death in 1616, his plays were collected into a single volume by his friends John Heminges and Henry Condell, actors and shareholders in the playwright’s troupe, the King’s Men.

The First Folio — fully titled “Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies” — contained 36 plays, of which half were published there for the first time. Without the book, scholars say, plays including “Macbeth,” “The Tempest” and “Twelfth Night” might have been lost. Sotheby’s called the volume “without question the most significant publication in the history of English literature.”

About 750 copies were printed in 1623, of which about 230 are known to survive. All but a few are in museums, universities or libraries. One of the few First Folios in private hands sold for $9.9 million at an auction in 2020.

The First Folio proved successful enough that an updated edition, the Second Folio, was published in 1632, a third in 1663 and a fourth in 1685.

Although the First Folio is regarded as the most valuable, the third is the rarest, with 182 copies known to survive. It is believed the third book’s rarity is because some of the stock was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

The Third Folio included seven additional plays, but only one – “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” – is believed to be by Shakespeare.

He arrived by evening on April 16 outside the White House, carrying a sign that called for for “Reparations Now.”

This time, Turner added another stop on his long day’s journey — the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Turner knelt in prayer and laid a wreath at the entrance of the museum in support of its mission, which incurred President Donald Trump’s criticism alongside other Smithsonian Institution sites. In a March 27 executive order, Trump alleged that Smithsonian exhibits had disparaged the nation’s history via a “divisive, race-centered ideology.”

Turner wanted to show support for the museum, which opened in 2016 and received its 10 millionth visitor in 2023. The museum tells the history of chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation and its lingering effects, but it also highlights the determination, successes and contributions of Black Americans and Black institutions.

“I laid my wreath down there to show solidarity with the museum and the history that they present every day,” said Turner, pastor of Empowerment Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore.

He said his church has committed to becoming a museum member, and he’s encouraged church members to do the same. Membership costs start at $25 per year, according to an online form on the museum site.

His church is not alone, as other predominantly Black congregations are taking similar steps.

Clergy calls for support

Turner said he got the idea from the Rev. Otis Moss III of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, whose church also joined the museum and who urged members to do the same. “For only $25 a year, you can protect Black history,” Moss told his church.

Two other Black pastors said they also supported the effort.

One was the Rev. Jacqui J. Lewis, senior minister at Middle Church in New York City — home to a multiracial congregation affiliated with the United Church of Christ.

“We belonged to the museum since its opening, and we just made another donation to them in light of this administration’s policies,” she said. The gift, she said, was a $1,000 “Easter Love donation.”

Bishop Timothy Clarke of the First Church of God in Columbus, Ohio, said he would be emulating Moss in making an appeal to his predominantly African American congregation.

“Our grandson is in DC on a field trip,” Clarke said in an email. “The highlight of his trip has been the visit to the Museum.”

Trump’s order didn’t specifically talk about budget cuts, though it tasked Vice President JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents by virtue of his office, to lead the effort to purge “improper ideology” from such institutions. He pledged to “restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.” Critics say he’s trying to force a distorted national narrative that glosses over slavery and other historical wrongs.

Pastor marching for reparations

Turner said he has been making his walk to Washington one day for each of the past 31 months. He’s calling for the U.S. to make reparations for the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation and other systemic suffering inflicted on Black people, ranging from housing and medical discrimination to mass incarceration. When he was previously a pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he similarly demonstrated for reparations for the 1921 race massacre.

Turner said when he arrived last week outside the White House, a crowd of visitors was milling about, and one child who noticed his sign asked a parent, “What is reparations?”

“That to me is a perfect manifestation about why we need to be teaching more true history of America, and not taking away certain subjects because they make people feel uncomfortable,” Turner said.

Moss, in a social media post, held out hope that the museum could continue its current course, noting that Vance is just one member of the board.

Trinity has long been socially active with a wide array of community outreaches, and Moss describes it as “a church that is unashamedly Black and unapologetically Christian.”

Former President Barack Obama had been a member of Trinity but resigned during the 2008 campaign, citing the “divisive” statements of its previous pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, while affirming the Black Church tradition of speaking out against injustice.

Democrats criticize executive order

The African American museum, one of 21 Smithsonian museums, has also seen a recent shake-up in leadership. Shanita Beckett, who was previously the head of operations at the museum, has been widely reported to be serving as interim director.

Kevin Young, a poet and scholar of African American history, left his role as museum director in early April, following a leave of absence, according to a notice to staff. The museum did not return the AP’s requests for comment this week.

On Friday, Democrats on the House Administration Committee, which has oversight over the Smithsonian Institution, expressed concern over the executive order in a letter addressed to Vance.

“This flagrant attempt to erase Black history is unacceptable and must be stopped,” said the letter signed by Reps. Joseph Morelle of New York, Terri Sewell of Alabama and Norma Torres of California.

“The attempt to paper over elements of American history is both cowardly and unpatriotic,” the letter said.

His composition “Echo of a Raindrop – From Within the Cave” also received an honorary mention at the Illinois Music Education Association Student Composition Contest in the Senior Instrumental Large Ensemble Category.

“I would say when I was writing it there were two things I had in mind. There was kind of a rainy mountain and an adventurer traveling through the mountain,” the Victor J. Andrew High School junior shared. “So the subtitle of the piece is ‘From Within the Cave.’ The idea is the adventurer stumbles across the cave and then you’re hearing the rainstorm within the cave and it echoes.”

The music for the composition, his ninth, came to Wilson when he found a chord on the piano. “Once I get that idea, I open my voice recorder and capture it as an audio note. I head downstairs and start writing and use that as a reference,” he said, adding that he plays each note of a chord separately so he can remember it.

“Echo” features 16 instruments, with the clave, a wooden percussion instrument often associated with Cuban music, being the most unusual.

“For the most part it’s a pretty standard orchestration. Clave and marimba. This piece feels a little bit Latin to me. It’s one of my favorite styles,” he shared. “It feels kind of jazzy but it’s also orchestra.”

Its jazzy nature is likely due to Wilson’s love of jazz piano and improvisation. He is the pianist for Andrew’s jazz ensemble and a member of its wind symphony and chorale, as well as being an oboist and English horn player with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra’s Philharmonic Orchestra and its Windy City Quintet Chamber Ensemble.

The talented Orland Park musician has played oboe for about six years but began taking piano lessons when he was just 4 years old, adding jazz lessons about six years ago. He’s not a newcomer to entering this contest. In fact, it’s the third time he’s entered.

“I have never gotten first before, so I didn’t have super high expectations. I was very surprised and excited when I got first place in the contest,” he said.

One of the challenges of writing the piece was keeping it within five minutes, one of the requirements of the CYSO’s nine-month composition seminar, led by Eric Malmquist.

Another is the software he uses, MuseScore, which had glitches in its latest version while he was writing it. “I think four or five times my flute part corrupted and I had to fix it and save copies. It was a bit of a struggle to get crescendos to go in the right spots.”

Wilson isn’t resting on his laurels, however, and already has started working on a new piece to be performed by Andrew’s wind symphony. During a concert sophomore year, he was challenged by band director Mark Iwinski to write a composition senior year.

“It’s a very cool opportunity,” he said. “It’s going to be more exciting. There will be more contrast between the fast and the slow, and it’s going to be longer – about twice as long.”

Wilson’s family couldn’t be happier about his latest awards. “I never fail to be amazed at the music he creates. It’s so rich and complex,” said dad Shane Wilson. “We’re just thrilled that it’s gotten him such recognition.”

His dad, a lifelong music lover, “can’t think of anything cooler than to have music created in your own home. Dash’s music just fills our house, and it’s wonderful to hear all the things he can do,” he said. “Dash starts out with these little musical ideas, and over the course of days and weeks, they just grow into these elaborate compositions. He amazes me every time.”

Michelle Clairmont-Wilson shares that pride and said she was so happy when “Echo” earned an award. “This was his third time I’d placed him in this (contest),” she said. “He got honorary mention two years in a row, basically fourth place, so it was great he got first place.”

She said her son’s compositions have a similarity despite their differences. “I would say a unifying thing I notice is I think all of his pieces have joy and melody. He loves melody. I think a challenge someday might be ‘Please write this atonal ear mangler,’” she joked.

“But I’m always surprised there’s a depth of emotion and some of those pieces have quite a bit of that. It’s surprising for someone of his age to tap into emotion. And some of his pieces, tiny bits of humor come through. Like in ‘Echo’ there’s this moment where there’s a slur on the clarinet that makes me laugh. That is his sense of humor sneaking into this.”

His mom wears many hats while supporting Dash and his music, including helping with his website, dashwilson.com, and guiding his interests.

“I guess we were nontraditional in that we were pretty adamant: Be a creator (of content) not a consumer. We really tried to encourage him to build it, make it, film it, instead of being the person sitting there passively watching it,” she shared. “So I think that was always my role: trying to find interesting opportunities for him and find teachers who were doing the stuff he was interested in.”

Clairmont-Wilson said writing a composition takes a lot more time than people think, averaging about a month for every minute of music her son creates.

“Fifteen seconds of music can take three to four hours to notate in software like MuseScore. Over the course of a month, it would take about 12 to 16 hours to yield a minute of notated music,” she explained. “Because Dash is obviously a student, he can’t devote to this full time. If you could give Dash anything, it would be a sabbatical where he could just devote himself full time to his two passions: coding and writing music.”

After graduating from Andrew, Wilson expects to stay involved with music. “Regardless of what happens, I think I’ll always be doing music,” he shared. “I’m looking at schools that have a strong music program as well as computer sciences.”

He also hopes to continue creating new work. “I enjoy the process of writing and I also enjoy the end result. But moreso, I love to share with others,” Wilson said. “I’ve tried painting and I’ve tried drawing, and it doesn’t come naturally to me like music does. Having a natural way to express my creativity is one of the main reasons I keep writing.”

Melinda Moore is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown. 

This year, 87 artists will display and sell their artwork at the juried art fair. The selection includes one-of-a-kind jewelry, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, prints, fiber arts, and even bejeweled cat collars.

A dozen food vendors will sell delicacies ranging from Polish food to hot dogs, citrus drinks, donuts and more.

Entertainment for children is planned at the Kids Court, where nine organizations will offer family activities and art projects.

And an extra attraction is a preview of CROSSINGS, the upcoming solo exhibition of sculptures and paintings by renowned Chicago-based artist Bernard Williams. CROSSINGS is curated by Allison Peters Quinn, executive director and chief curator of the Elmhurst Art Museum since December.

“This is my first exhibition at the museum since I started in December,” Quinn said. “We wanted to pick an artist that was in the collection. He’s an artist that I’ve worked with in the past for large sculptures.”

Quinn first curated a show of Williams’ work around 2005 when she worked at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Artist Williams said he called this exhibit CROSSINGS because “it captures a broad body of concerns.”

“It connects a lot of the various works together,” he said. “I’m showing a couple car sculptures. One sculpture is a life-sized farm tractor. I’m showing an airplane. Some of those cross-over each other through history and ideas about human development in various ways. They all have thematic inspirations.”

Several of the pieces that will be exhibited at Art in Wilder Park are sculptures that Williams has exhibited at other sculpture parks. In addition, the Elmhurst Art Museum commissioned two new sculptures.

Quinn praised Williams’ sculptures saying, “He has a very particular visual language. It’s almost hieroglyphic in that his symbols are images of a pig or an airplane. He tells a story through symbols that are universal and people can understand.”

Quinn added that she is a supporter of his work because “he is talking about history that is not maybe so well known or about Black American history that we all need to learn. I think that they’re educational but they’re also beautiful.”

The exhibit will include four sculptures outside and one large airplane sculpture in the Hostetler Gallery in the Elmhurst Art Museum.

“The airplane was inspired by Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman to obtain a pilot’s license in the 1920s,” Williams noted. “Her life story has been really powerful and inspirational and intriguing — and she had roots in Chicago. She was living in Chicago when she left for France because no one would teach her here in the states. She got accepted to an aeronautical school in France.

“In Bernard’s work, he’s been interested in cars and speed and the liberation that anybody can feel when they’re in a car and they have the ability to go place to place,” Quinn said. “So, we’re showing a couple of the cars.”

Another piece, which is a tractor, was previously shown at the Arts Club of Chicago.

“It’s in recognition of the Black Famers’ Settlement, which was the largest settlement made,” Quinn reported. “Billions of dollars going to Black farmers for reparations for discrimination against the Black farmers from the USDA.”

“My grandparents were farmers in Alabama,” Williams noted. “Extended relatives were involved in the Black Farmers’ Settlement around 2016.”

The two commissioned pieces are steel pole sculptures—one dedicated to Coleman and the other to the legacy of Black cowboys.

Williams said the pieces in CROSSINGS are typical of the work that he has been doing for the last 20 years. “It’s always been a mix of materials and various historical connections,” the artist said. “It grows out of some of my own interests and studies around American history.”

The materials Williams used in the various sculptures in CROSSINGS include plywood for the car sculptures, along with machine-carved foam and metal.

A couple of Williams agricultural-themed paintings will also be in the show.

Having his work exhibited at the Elmhurst Art Museum is “a real honor. It’s always great when somebody shows appreciation for one’s work,” Williams declared.

The solo exhibit will run until Aug. 17.

For more information about Art in Wilder Park, visit elmhurstartmuseum.org.

Myrna Petlicki is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.