Chicago’s Intuit Art Museum set to unveil $10m renovation

After a two-year, $10m renovation, the Intuit Art Museum (formerly known as Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art) will open for a public preview on 25 April during Expo Chicago, then officially on 23 May for a grand reopening.

Intuit was launched in 1991 by a group of passionate volunteers who were collectors, including the artists Roger Brown and Don Baum. The centre took over the old Randolph Street Gallery on the first floor of a 150-year-old brick building west of downtown. The museum has now tripled its footprint and includes a lower level with its only permanent installation, the Henry Darger Room, which recreates the reclusive janitor’s one-room apartment and studio in Chicago where he lived for 40 years and produced an astonishing body of work. Chicago’s connection to outsider art runs deep; in 1951, the French artist and collector Jean Dubuffet gave a talk at the Arts Club of Chicago on Art Brut, the genre and movement he coined, which has since grown to encompass outsider and self-taught art.

Intuit’s president and chief executive, Debra Kerr, a museum studies educator with extensive institutional experience, joined the museum in 2014 and helped raise the money to get the building project off the ground. She worked with the local architecture firm Doyle & Associates to balance improvements for access and more natural light while preserving some of the space’s historic character. For instance, one thick yellow wall on the second floor has a patina of age that keeps the white cube galleries on either side from seeming too clinical.

The museum’s reconfigured first floor includes a gallery that will feature works from the permanent collection. Two spacious galleries on the second floor are devoted to special exhibitions and will host the inaugural show, Catalyst: Im/migration and Self-taught Art in Chicago (23 May-11 January 2026), featuring the creative contributions of migrants and immigrants in Chicago from the 1930s to the present.

Alison Amick, Intuit’s chief curator and director of exhibitions, says that support from the Terra Foundation’s Art Design Chicago initiative allowed her and her co-curator Dana Boutin to take the time to research an area of the outsider art field that had not really been explored.

“We spoke to more than 200 people and formed an advisory committee to help guide our thinking,” Amick says. “Visually, it will be very exciting.” The exhibition features 75 works by 22 artists working in a range of media including, for instance, the work of Thomas Kong (1950-2023), who filled his convenience store in the Rogers Park neighbourhood with his collages and assemblages.

Increasing awareness

“We are hoping that the exhibition is very generative and that we continue to become aware of more artists,” Amick says. “It won’t be a complete survey or perhaps inclusive of every self-taught immigrant artist in Chicago, but we hope it will lead us to become aware of more artists.”

Cleo Wilson, one of the founding board members of Intuit, worked at the Playboy Foundation for 25 years, serving for the bulk of that time as its executive director. She retired in 2005 but, even while working, she supported Intuit initially as communications director when it first opened, then later as its director.

“Early on, we didn’t want to be a museum,” Wilson says. “It was Bob’s idea that we would be a kunsthalle and we wouldn’t have a collection,” she adds, referring to Bob Roth, a founding member and Intuit’s first president, who is also the founder and former publisher of the alternative weekly newspaper the Chicago Reader—and Wilson’s partner.

That changed, Wilson says, as the institution began to receive donations and as the visionary group of founders aged and pledged their collections to Intuit. Two of the galleries are named after founding members who left legacy gifts: Jan Petry, an art director and vice-president at the Leo Burnett advertising agency who was also an artist and served on the board for 30 years until her death at 85 in 2024; and Susann Craig, who had roots in fashion, who died aged 84 in 2021.

Wilson will also have a space named after her: the Center for Learning, Engagement and Opportunities (Cleo). She adds: “I have seen other people’s names on things, but I never thought that would happen to me. Not bad for a Black girl from the projects.”

• Catalyst: Im/migration and Self-taught Art in Chicago is at Intuit Art Museum, Chicago, 23 May-11 January 2026