Bluhm Family Gives $5 M. to MCA Chicago for Gender Equity Fund

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago has received a $5 million endowment from trustee and board vice chair Leslie Bluhm, given on behalf of the Chicago philanthropic Bluhm family. The gift benefits the museum's Women Artists Initiative (WAI), which works toward gender equity in its exhibition programming and permanent collection. To mark the upcoming departure of longtime director Madeleine Grynsztejn, who established the initiative, WAI will be renamed the Madeleine Fund for Women Artists.

A fund with a decade behind it

WAI began in 2015 with a mandate for gender parity in the MCA Chicago's exhibition program and acquisitions. Over the past decade the museum has raised $2.5 million for the initiative, with funding directed toward exhibition catalogs and operational costs such as installation, shipping and insurance. Supported shows include solos for Faith Ringgold, Nicole Eisenman, Firelei Báez and Yoko Ono; the Ono exhibition used funding to help realize 40 performances during its run. WAI money has not yet been used to purchase an artwork for acquisition but could be used that way in the future, while works commissioned for exhibitions with WAI funds have entered the permanent collection.

The gap the initiative tracked

For WAI's first five years, Grynsztejn and her team tracked how the museum fundraised for its exhibitions. By their own accounting, they found it was 37 percent harder to raise the funds to realize an exhibition of a woman artist than that of a male artist. That figure sits against their data that women artists' solo exhibitions were 16 percent better attended than those of male artists, and against a US population that is around 50 percent female.

By the museum's account, 54 percent of its solo exhibitions between 2020 and 2025 were dedicated to women-identifying artists, while 50 percent of its annual acquisitions for that period were by women-identifying artists, against national averages of 14.9 percent of solo exhibitions and 11 percent of acquisitions reported by the Burns Halperin Report for US museums from 2008 to 2020.

How the fund operates

Once a budget for a given exhibition is set, the MCA Chicago evaluates how much has been raised and what remains. When no other funding comes through, it taps the fund "very intentionally to make it fiscally possible to execute on those shows at the highest level," Grynsztejn said. She described the endowment as a way to "close the exhibition funding gap between men and women artists" and said the museum "never again have to hesitate and ask ourselves, 'Do we have the money?'"

An institutional and financial commitment

Board chair Bill Silverstein called the recognition of Grynsztejn a "well-deserved honor" and said the transition of WAI into an endowed fund is "a real sign of the commitment of the institution and the permanence of the commitment going forward." He described the endowment as "a real financial commitment" that allows the MCA Chicago, which will celebrate 60 years in 2027, to sustain the practice for the next 60 years. The $5 million gift is part of the museum's ongoing capital campaign, described in a statement as intended "to strengthen the institution's long-term financial support and ensure its continued impact for generations to come."

A donor's challenge

Leslie Bluhm said her family was "very shocked by the huge gender imbalance in collections of major art museums across the United States" after Grynsztejn presented the data. She said she hopes the gift inspires other donors to give to the Madeleine Fund and that she anticipates it will grow over time. Silverstein said he sees the endowment as a challenge to other patrons: "I think all of our donors take note of it, and it challenges all of us to elevate our own standards of what we should be doing philanthropically for important art causes such as this." Grynsztejn characterized WAI's work as "a good business decision" because of its effect on museum visitorship, adding that it is "not only frankly the right thing to do. It's the right business thing to do."