Chicago (Ill)

The longtime art collector and marketing executive Denise Gardner will become the chairwoman of the Art Institute of Chicago in November, perhaps the country’s first Black woman to hold that position on a major museum board.

“It’s hard to avoid the historical significance,” Gardner said in a telephone interview on Monday. “That does add a sense of responsibility and pressure to succeed, and that’s fine with me. I like to exceed expectations.”

Gardner, 66, will succeed Robert M. Levy — whose term ends in November — at the helm of the Institute’s school as well as the museum.

Having served for 15 years as a trustee and for five in her current role as vice chair, Gardner has championed Black artists as well as art accessibility and education for underrepresented audiences. “The work is still unfinished,” Gardner said. “In this role, I can help the museum accelerate its progress.”

Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, established last fall to help museums bring on more Black trustees, artists and curators.

“A leader with her credentials is exactly what we need right now to take us into the future,” James Rondeau, the museum’s director, said in a phone interview on Monday. Given the Art Institute’s ongoing commitment to diversity, he added, “The experiences and the perspectives that she brings as a Black woman who is so connected to the city of Chicago will only be an asset.”

Gardner — together with her husband, Gary — was the lead individual sponsor of the museum’s 2018 exhibition, “Charles White: A Retrospective,” which traveled to the Museum of Modern of Art. (The Gardners own three White works on paper.)

Her collection focuses on Black and female artists, including Frank Bowling, Nick Cave and Carrie Mae Weems. She was an early buyer of Amy Sherald, whose popularity has surged since her official portrait of Michelle Obama, which hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

“I want people of color to know the history and the power and the contribution of their own people in the visual arts,” Gardner said. “That’s not something I enjoyed in my education as a young person. I remember as an adult when I learned about Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence and I was almost a little angry — why didn’t I know about these artists?”

Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, which supports conservation and small arts organizations.

Gardner said she was brought to the Art Institute as a volunteer almost 27 years ago by Jetta Jones, the museum’s first Black female trustee, who died last weekend at 95. “I hope she knows what’s happening and I think she would have been overjoyed,” Gardner said. “This job could have been hers.”

Meanwhile, in 2020 a group of 170 experts known as the Muon g-2 Theory Initiative published a new consensus value of the theoretical value of muon’s magnetic moment, based on three years of workshops and calculations using the Standard Model. That answer reinforced the original discrepancy reported by Brookhaven.

Reached by phone on Monday, Aida X. El-Khardra, a physicist at the University of Illinois and a co-chair of the Muon g-2 Theory Initiative, said she did not know the result that Fermilab would be announcing two days later — and she didn’t want to, lest she be tempted to fudge in a lecture scheduled just before the official unveiling on Wednesday.

“I have not had the feeling of sitting on hot coals before,” Dr. El-Khadra said. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

On the day of the Fermilab announcement another group, using a different technique known as a lattice calculation to compute the muon’s magnetic moment, concluded that there was no discrepancy between the Brookhaven measurement and the Standard Model.

“Yes, we claim that there is no discrepancy between the Standard Model and the Brookhaven result, no new physics,” said Zoltan Fodor of Pennsylvania State University, one of the authors of a report published in Nature on Wednesday.

Dr. El-Khadra, who was familiar with that work, called it an “amazing calculation, but not conclusive.” She noted that the computations involved were horrendously complicated, having to account for all possible ways that a muon could interact with the universe, and requiring thousands of individual sub-calculations and hundreds of hours of supercomputer time.

These lattice calculations, she said, needed to be checked against independent results from other groups to eliminate the possibility of systematic errors. For now, the Theory Initiative’s calculation remains the standard by which the measurements will be compared.

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Richard H. Driehaus, an avid investor who grew his grade-school coin collection into a fortune that he wielded to champion historic preservation and classical architecture, died on March 9 in a Chicago hospital. He was 78.

The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, said a spokeswoman for Driehaus Capital Management, where, as chief investment officer and chairman, he had overseen some $13 billion in assets.

Mr. Driehaus (pronounced DREE-house) restored landmarks in the Chicago area and gave the city a palatial museum that celebrates the Gilded Age. He also established a $200,000 annual prize in his name for classical, traditional and sustainable architecture as a counterbalance to the $100,000 Pritzker Prize, funded by another Chicago family, which he viewed as a validation of modern motifs that were a “homogenized” rejection of the past.

He was immersed in the stock market from the age of 13, took nosebleed gambles on risky rising stocks, and in 2000 was named one of the 25 most influential mutual fund figures of the 20th century by Barron’s.

Institute of Classical Architecture & Art in 2012.

“The problem is there’s no poetry in modern architecture,” he said in an interview with Chicago magazine in 2007. “There’s money — but no feeling or spirit or soul. Classicism has a mysterious power. It’s part of our past and how we evolved as human beings and as a civilization.”

Asked whether he considered buildings designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, for example, to be appropriate, he told Architectural Record in 2015: “They’re mechanical, industrial, not very human. It’s like my iPhone, which is beautiful, but I wouldn’t want the building I live in to look like that.” He added: “Architects build for themselves and build for the publicity. They don’t really care what the public thinks.”

The first Richard H. Driehaus Prize, presented through the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, was awarded in 2003 to Léon Krier, a designer of Poundbury, the model British town built according to the Prince of Wales’s architectural principles. The first American laureate, in 2006, was the South African-born Allan Greenberg, who redesigned the Treaty Room Suite at the State Department.

Philanthropy magazine in 2012. “What my dad couldn’t do, I wanted to do.”

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Art Institute of Chicago Names Its Next Board Chief